That was the comment from a delighted Ian who took six colleagues out to mid Wales for a day of full on rallying. Based around classic Welsh forest rally stages and despite the cold temperatures of early February; the drivers kept warm on adrenalin with quite literally hours being spent behind the wheel.  Wildside arranged for the group to have this as a private and exclusive day so there was complete one-to-one tuition throughout and with plenty of cars and instructors very little hanging about.  The day ended with a ‘pukka’ timed stage with each driver hurling an Impreza through the stage and host Ian somehow managed to set fastest time of the day to win!  Want to know more: contact Wildside.

In the states I used to go tailgate skiing. All that is a required is a 4×4 pick up truck and some rope. Tie the rope to the tailgate and hold onto the rope (you don’t even need skis but some decent boots help) and the driver of the 4×4 pulls away.

The winner is the one person who stays on their rope the longest. I have seen speeds of 40 mph before the last person bails out. Of course the big issue is when the truck brakes and you can’t…..

If you want to get behind the wheel and experience some real ice racing or rallying Wildside offer courses in France, Italy and Sweden. Absolutely incredible.

Last year was quite unbelievable in terms of the chaos caused and the earlier predictions of this winter being the same seem to so far be wide of the mark.

I once spent three years in the USA and every winter we had pretty severe snow (I was living in Washington state) but once you become used to the conditions you adapt your driving accordingly. Here we simply do not get that experience so when we get an inch or two the road system and the drivers cannot cope. In the States they make the most of it.

I can remember heading for a huge supermarket car park at around 6am on a Sunday morning with a couple of mates. It had snowed lightly but steadily all night and the car park was a massive area of untouched snow. Along with a couple of mates in their Corvettes (I was in an Austin Healey 3000) we proceeded to spend an hour having a fantastic time sliding, handbrake turning, skidding, throttle steering et al.

I learned more in that hour about driving on snow than ever I learned on the road and I’m grateful that the lessons have stuck with me. If winters turn out to be consistently bad perhaps we need some form of snow driving courses? An open area of tarmac and a couple of snow machines should get the show on the road…..

But there was no way after checking on forum after the other that I could work out how to restore the damn things. Why is it that people answering Forum questions (and indeed people asking the questions) must talk with all sorts of technical gobble – sometime it’s like reading the small print of an insurance contract.

The answers usually start with: ‘This is really simple and easy to do……’ it then spears off into some form of technical speak that even NASA would have issues with.

So I managed to download a piece of software that after 6 hours of opening, copying, pasting, transferring finally got my emails restored.

A real sense of achievement. I imagine that an expert could have probably done it by banging three keys but where is the pleasure in that?

In that case might I suggest a Wildside F1 Driving course?  It might be a little expensive compared  to  another jumper….Anyway, the big issue at Christmas is just how many parties you can get invited to and just how much ‘free’ food and ‘free’ drink you can get through. On many of these occasions the booze is a necessary essential to get through a lunchtime or evening of meeting some really uninteresting people as this is often the only time in a year  you meet the ‘other half’.

Of course, the opposite is always true and you meet some fascinating people. Last weekend; I had two parties to attend.  One with a bunch of old muckers that I have know for years and that was a perfect lunch of old war stories which finished far too early at 6.30pm. The next night it was my girlfriend’s office bash.

Expectations low but delivery was great. I met a chap who was a petrolhead and actually owned a 968. So the rest of the evening passed in a gentle alcoholic haze of swapped stories and exchange of car histories. So next time you get invited to something you don’t’ really want to attend – just got for it and never say no. It could actually be a lot better than you imagine.

The car is now MoT’d, fully serviced and running perfectly. It now needs a respray on the bonnet/nose to sort out the  chips and that’s about it.  Of course it wasn’t cheap but then what is? Many, many years ago my first car was a Frogeye Sprite (44 BXL) and in those impecunious days servicing was something you did with a Haynes manual in one hand and a hammer in the other. My technical abilities have not actually developed much further.

Anyway, I thought it was time to give the old Frog a brush up – underneath. I had already repainted the car from red to dark blue (using a wallpaper paste brush as the application device and I had invested in a new brush at least) and this gave an ‘interesting’ hand finished look – particularly in sunlight as the dust that had stuck into the paint sparkled in an early form of metallic finish.  Anyway, armed with a couple of big tins of gold underseal; I popped the car up on the jack and crawled underneath and got busy with the paint (using the wallpaper paste brush).

One hour later and wearing as much underseal as I had applied, there was still half a can left.  Waste not, want not; so I set to painting the exhaust system and silencer as in my wisdom this was providing another protective layer. Of course, the test drive (you always had to test that your repairs/improvements had worked) was interesting.

Heading into the centre of Oxford (my home town) and stopped at traffic lights there was a peculiar burning and melting oil odour and a gentle smoke screen oozing from under the car and indeed into it (the floor had a certain air cooling system – rust holes) and so coughing and spluttering with eyes watering (and that was just the pedestrians) I turned for home where on arrival the underseal had burnt off.  I have never undersealed a car since.

There can’t be too many cars out there that cost relatively little to buy, provide ample performance and excellent handling and yet suffer from almost zero depreciation.  The cars have been everyday transport and covered the odd track day but have been remarkably reliable and with the back seats down incredibly roomy for carrying stuff around. But, I reckon it’s time to go a bit soft and get my hands on a convertible.

I have always liked the look of a 944 S2 soft top (I have owned a couple of the coupes) so in 2012 the hunt is on and this time I plan to make this one a keeper – definitely plan to have it before Le Mans 2012 and it might even do the run down to the Monaco GP. Keep you posted on progress in later blogs.

Got to admit it’s really fascinating and I am in danger of getting hooked. In the space of a couple of days I now have loads of friends (don’t know how that happened!) and it’s great to catch up with people I have not seen for some time.

These are mainly people from our Le Mans, F1, Monaco GP and Cannonball events. Of course the downside is that suddenly pictures of moi keep appearing. Strange how all of them seem to have me with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other; I shall have to keep my camera ready on future events to capture moments of pictorial revenge.

This was staged at the Paul Ricard circuit (which in those days was used for F1 testing and indeed had hosted the French GP on several occasions). We hired the whole facility for a few days and then flew journalists into the track for a series of back-to-back tests using Porsches fitted with the Comp T/A and the Pirelli P7.

The journos would take out the Comp T/A equipped car and then jump into an identical Porsche fitted with the P7 and be able to compare the handling, road-holding etc., I spent the time at the track driving between the tests in a 911 (as one of the journalists pointed out: ’discovering the outer limits of my handling envelope’) as a 20 something year old it doesn’t get much better than that or does it? We had to take the cars every night around 100 kms away to the nearest Pirelli P7 centre to get the cars fitted with new rubber for the next day.

This was in the days with no cameras and the police were not too hot on speeding. As this convoy of 911s, 928s and 944s sped through the Provence countryside – it really was one of those Kodak moments and would have made a perfect Top Gear Challenge -  just who was going to make it to the garage first. Plus of course there was always the return trip….And naturally,  the older you get the faster you were!