The fast and the furious…
Monday, February 25th, 2008We went out last night to a pub in Kings Heath, Birmingham to catch the 7 inch cinema - short films made by normal people on Super 8 cameras. Very good it was too, with some extremely funny films being shown. Our favourites - Sticks and Balls (I’ll never look at the game of Golf the same way again) and one about Stephen Hawkin’s cat - hilarous and very clever.
See http://www.7inch.org.uk/Â for more…Â
On the way back home we got caught up in some crazy Too Fast Too Furious road racing action on the A45. Think Scoobys, Mitsubishi’s, Skylines, hissing dump valves and all that Jazz. It’s completely irresponsible of course to hold illegal street racing, but it was kinda fun - especially as they were all filming themselves. While this is outrageously dangerous to do, car nuts have been doing it for years.
Think Hot Rodders in the Forties and Fifties and you’ll get the drift (did you see what I did there? Drift? Geddit?) We tried to keep up from the lights, but the Ford KA we occupied was somewhat lacking in horsepower. One of our fellow civilian drivers at the lights was a lad in a BMW M3 (lookalike). He seemed to take umbridge at this blatant show of Japanese four wheel drive power (I estimate there to be around fifteen racers in the group).
Foolishly, he decided to join in. Of course, the Evo’s, Impreza WRC’s and Skyline’s all left him for dead, which was extremely satisfying to watch - he looked quite sheepish at the next set of lights, the whiff of clutch smoke still hanging thick in the air…
Talking of Impreza’s, I’m sitting here watching my favourite motorsport on the telly - the rallying of course. What a noble, skillful sport, long left out in the wilderness for non-satellite TV equipted Luddites like me. While F1 gets all the limelight (and seemingly gets more repetitive year on year - although I’m starting to get back into it again) the rallying goes on getting better and better.
I always wanted to be a rally driver, and have had a little go (a rally training day bought for my 30th birthday) and was pleased to report that I was rubbish at it - if I’d been any good I’d have been so annoyed that I missed my calling. Armed with a Group N Scooby doo I proceded to visciously mow down a fine selection of cones - well I got one anyhow.
So what is the point of these ramblings? Well it’s the new Impreza. What a dull looking machine, and having seen the rally version - which looked like a Daewoo Lanos with a spoiler - I can honestly say I’ve not been this disappointed for a long time. I knew that the road car looked bland (no matter how good it may be to drive) but was expecting the rally versions to look a bit better at least. They don’t - well at least the production class cars don’t. I’ll have to wait to see what the WRC version looks like.
 
Photos from http://www.tommimakinen.net
In the meantime, let’s hope that Mitsubishi bring out a new Evo that looks like a stealth fighter to keep things interesting - it would be a terrible shame if Japanese performance cars got all boring looking on us wouldn’t it? I’m off now to watch Fifth Gear smash up another brand new Renault - Renault seem to give them cars all the time. Aren’t PR departments great….
