Crikey. Has it really been over a month since the last bit of blogging?
Yes readers (both of you), it has. This can mean only one thing.
It's been a good year for the blatting.
First off, at the end of June, the monthly topping up of Lord March's pension fund in return for some organic sausages known otherwise as the Goodwood Breakfast Club....
A good day out overall, and one that started under a cloudless blue sky at 6am, signalling the first decent dawn blat of the year. Now, with the theme for this Breakfast Club being "Soft Top Sunday", Sevens were allowed on to the track to congregate with all the other open cars be they from the Caterhamesque stable, yet another TVR, or the slightly more subtle offering of an utterly charming Series 1 Land Rover. Like a nice cup of tea, but with four wheel drive. It is a soft top, after all, and probably more appropriate than the Peugeot 206CC on show.
The Pug was indicative of an interesting motoring phenomenon that became all the more obvious and prevalent as the day went on, whereby anyone whose company car scheme permits the folding roof version of a fairly standard rep-mobile came along claiming rights to the Goodwood tarmac. This is where it all goes wrong. People seem to confuse soft tops with "cabriolets". You see, a soft top is a car intended from the outset to have no roof, and is aimed at hardy travellers who drink tea, have no real dress sense beyond practicality and think metric spanners are just a fad. By contrast, a cabriolet is simply a marketing man's clever scheme to make Keith from Accounts buy an otherwise standard car, but one that's been attacked with an angle grinder, and charge him an extra couple of grand for exclusivity about as faux as the leather seats, and have him think he's in Nice not Nuneaton. Not that there's anything wrong with Warwickshire you understand, it's just not the South of France.
But anyway, marques not usually seen gracing a Goodwood event such as Golfs, Astras, and legions of BMW were all present, and an original factory produced Vauxhall Cavalier Cabriolet.
The popularity of these family drop-tops is evident in the following photo. All hail the mighty Ford Escort XR3i Cabriolet......
So, having fought our way through the crowd to admire Dagenham's finest, we noticed another interesting yet all the more worrying trend.......Right car, wrong colour.
Some things in life are just right. Other are just wrong. A Morris Minor in Old English White with a burgundy interior is definitely right. An E-Type Jag in metallic blue with beige leather interior is without doubt wrong. Other automotive hue-related howlers we noticed were an Alfa Romeo in an authentic shade of snot green, a monstrous Bentley Continental in glittery metallic white paint with grout-grey insides, inspired no doubt by Barry White's bathroom, a classic Rolls Royce the colour of a bruise and a Volvo. At this point the game just became known as "Wrong car no matter what colour".
Oh well.....Le Mans was only a fortnight away.....
