A fond farewell to The Champion

You might have read elsewhere that The Champion newspapers, which cover the Sefton coastline and the towns and villages of West Lancashire, are no longer being printed. That also means that my Life On Cars column, which has been running since 2009, will no longer be printed in their pages.

I’m saddened first and foremost for my friends and colleagues at The Champion who have lost their jobs, and for the 110,000 people who’ve lost a reliable source of news popping through their letterbox every Wednesday. Regular readers will know that The Champion was the newspaper that gave a spotty 15-year-old me a gig doing work experience more than 20 years ago, and many years later I was one of its full-time reporters.

The experience I chalked up there, and particularly Life On Cars, is what later landed me my job at Classic Car Weekly – and for that, I’ll be eternally grateful. I want to say thank you to all the petrolhead Champion readers for the kind words and support you’ve given me over the years.

Hope to see you at a car show soon!

Southport’s celebration of speed is back

THE HOWL of race-tuned Jaguars and carefully fettled fast Fords thundering up Southport’s seafront could be hitting your eardrums pretty soon. 

That’s the big pitch for Southport’s Classic & Speed, which returns to the resort next month following its inaugural outing last year. Last weekend the event’s organisers got in touch to confirm that they’re looking to close a half-mile section of Marine Drive as part of this year’s event. It’s an intriguing new spinoff for the resort’s celebration of motoring, especially as Aintree Circuit Club’s other well-known event, the Ormskirk MotorFest, isn’t going ahead with its usual August Bank Holiday weekend outing this year. In other words, if you turn up to the West Lancashire town’s one-way system this Sunday expecting any single-seaters to be buzzing around, you’re going to be disappointed. 

It’ll be great to see motorsport-prepared classics powering up Marine Drive instead, but it’s worth mentioning that while the marshals will be treating it as they would any other motorsport event, with some prohibited areas on the inland side of the road for safety reasons, the runs will be a strictly controlled, low-speed affair, with none of the entries being timed and no one being given prizes for being the quickest. A pre-invited cast of cars will be flagged off at one-minute intervals from the Southport Offshore Rescue Trust centre en-route to the area where the pier threads its way through the Ocean Plaza, and while it will be worth watching it won’t be competitive. 

It’s effectively a test bed for 2023’s follow-up event, and Aintree Circuit Club is already talking to the relevant people at Sefton Council about how the seafront can be turned into a sprint course this time next year. That’d be really exciting to watch, and it has some historical precedent too; long before the Coastal Road was built, this stretch of road was used for exactly that purpose, so it’s a neat way of bringing some of the north west’s motoring heritage back to life. 

Of course, even without the seafront demonstration runs there’s plenty to make it worth jotting in your diary, including all of the elements that stood out from the event’s maiden voyage. So that means lots of cars and bikes going on show in Victoria Park, and the chance to see a copious cast of classics being put through their paces along the Promenade and Lord Street.  

And the best bit is that it costs….absolutely nothing. I’ve seen too many car shows struggling with dwindling attendance and rising admission prices this summer as their organisers – just like the rest of us – grapple with the cost of living crisis, but this is genuinely a day of petrolhead fun that you can enjoy without having to stick your hand in your pocket. 

Sounds good to me. Get Sunday, 11 September jotted down in the diary…

Small convertibles are fun – and virtually extinct

CHANCES are it’s probably chucking it down by the time you read this week’s Champion, but as this is being written it’s 32 degrees – which means it’s time to trot out all the summer cliches. 

Ladies wearing skimpy tops. Blokes not wearing tops at all. But not, to cut short a time-honoured tradition gracing newsagents for several decades, motoring magazines proclaiming it’s time to GO TOPLESS while parading bargain-priced convertibles across their covers.  

I’m not talking MX-5s or Z4s or other two-seater sports cars; I’m on about cheap ‘n’ cheerful, family-friendly droptops based on decapitated versions of the nation’s big sellers. I suspect I know the reason why they aren’t doing the rounds in the motoring mags right now. Put simply, with a handful of exceptions, there aren’t any. 

Less than a decade ago I remember road-testing Volkswagen’s Golf MkVI Cabriolet in The Champion’s pages, but nowadays there is no open-air spinoff of Europe’s best-seller – instead, the only droptop it’ll sell you is an open-top T-Roc, for which you need at least £31k. Ford will no longer flog you an al fresco Focus and Vauxhall’s Astra Cabriolet is long gone, as its successor of sorts, the Cascada. Peugeot made a name for itself in the Noughties with SLK-esque folding metal roofs, but neither the 208 nor the 308 carry on this nifty feature. Nor does Renault, which in the Nineties would sell you a Megane in Convertible form – and a hatch, saloon, estate, coupé and people carrier for that matter – but these days does just the five-door hatch. 

Just about your only options include the Smart ForTwo Cabrio, which on account of being electric-only currently costs £24,645. In fact, it’s Fiat who’ll fix you up with Britain’s cheapest cabriolet, the 500C at £16,655, although it’d much rather you help the Italians reduce their carbon footprint by spending an extra £13,000 on the much newer all-electric model. MINI’s entry-level Cabriolet, meanwhile, will set you back £22,105, but after that you’re into posh German metal if you’re looking for wind in not just your hair, but the barnetts of your nearest and dearest too. That means the drop-top versions of Audi’s A5, Mercedes’ C-Class and BMW’s 4-Series, all of which start at around £44,000. Ouch. 

I’m sure there are all sorts of profitability reasons why, like coupés, cabriolets have all but vanished from the nation’s forecourts, but having grown up in an era when you could have everything from a droptop Metro to the Saab 900 Convertible, I miss four-seater cabrios. And, I suspect, so do you, given the amount of you I’ve seen out and about in secondhand Audi A4 Convertibles and Golf Cabriolets during the latest heatwave.  

But never mind – the car industry reckons you’re not interested anyway. Would Sir be interested in yet another small crossover? 

ANYONE for chips?

Not the kind that you get on Friday night with a helping of battered cod, mind. This week we’re on about the kind that people are really craving right now. 

Sorry, potato purveyors of the north west, but the chips in question are the ones that go into your car rather than the ones best enjoyed with a spot of curry sauce. The global shortage of components, and particularly semiconductors, has had all sorts of weird ramifications for the car industry. And, in a nutshell, it’s why there are plenty of stories doing the rounds of people of ordering new cars and having to wait months, or worse, having their orders cancelled altogether. 

It’s the reason why the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said this week that new car registrations were down nine per cent in July, making it the fifth consecutive fall – and even though electric cars are bucking the trend and still increasing in sales, their growth rate is slowing, with would-be buyers held back by the wider supply chain issues. 

But the insatiable appetite for cars is still there – which is why, at the same time, a study into used cars has shown that the cumulative average price for secondhand buys is up by nearly 20 per cent. All those people who can’t get their bums into a shiny new Corsa are simply heading to dealers and car supermarkets instead in search of a pre-owned example, presumably engaging in a round of light fisticuffs with everyone else who had the same idea.   

Nor, from painful experience, is sitting it out and occasionally renting something necessarily a way out either. I’ve been lucky enough to know when I’m travelling and been able to book several weeks in advance and have a freshly polished Kia deposited on my doorstep, but colleagues who’ve needed rentals at short notice have been told that nothing’s available because everything’s been booked up (by me). Don’t like the car you’ve been given? Tough. 

In short – and there are all sorts of reasons for this, from China’s zero-cases policy on Covid, an ongoing logjam in global shipping, and Vladmir Putin’s summer visit to Ukraine – there just aren’t enough cars to go around. The reason why new car sales are down isn’t because people don’t want them; it’s that the carmakers literally can’t build enough of them. 

Don’t fancy spending over the odds on your next buy, or waiting month after month for a new car? For me, the answer’s simple – even in these stunted moments for the UK’s car market there are still all sorts of cars crying out for new owners, but you just have to cast your net a bit wider, and trawl through the classifieds and find something really interesting. You could, for instance, spend £12,250 on a brand-new Kia Picanto – or for the same money, you could have a BMW 740i, with 69,000 miles on the clock and a 4.4-litre V8 beneath its bonnet, sat on your driveway. 

I know which I’d rather have. Make mine a 7-series with chips and curry sauce, please… 

The pressure’s on for MG’s new sports car

IF YOU’RE going to launch your new sports car without the baggage, don’t bill it as “the return of the legend”. And certainly don’t tease it with a slick trailer that’s at least as good as anything you’ll see on Netflix.

But that’s exactly what MG did on Monday, so baggage it is. Readers with longer memories will already know that they’ve been threatening to do this for ages because 18 months ago they showed off the two-seater Cyberster in concept car form, and now they’re edging ever closer to making a concept version. About ruddy time, because for those under the age of 15, MG is a company best known for sports cars, not me-too crossovers.

However, MG has stopped tip-toeing around its illustrious heritage. The first move its Chinese paymasters made after snapping up the brand was to put the old TF roadster, with some blink-and-you-miss-it tweaks, into production, but since then it’s been a stream of hatches and crossovers that could have come from any Asian carmaker. I can’t have been the only one who cringed when the MG 6 was launched a decade ago in two forms that nicked names from classic MGs – GT for the hatch, Magnette for the saloon – and showed them alongside a 1960s Midget on a mountain switchback in the TV ad. Nice try, but you couldn’t help conclude that you’d rather have the leaky old roadster.

But that was a long time ago and MG is now Britain’s fastest growing carmaker, thanks largely to a Popeye-esque diet of crossovers to build up your market strength, and being quick off the mark to spot the increasingly hefty appetite for electric-only offerings. It’s also making cars that are making cynical motoring writer types like me sit up and take note too; only a few weeks ago in this very column I reckoned the new MG4 was the firm’s first truly exciting model in more than a decade, and while I haven’t driven the latest MG5 yet, those who have are praising it for being a small, unpretentious estate car that does away with all the hype and just quietly gets on with the job in hand.

The Cyberster, on the other hand, is all about hype. It’ll almost certainly be MG’s slowest-selling model because the queue for cheap, mass-market sports cars is tiny these days – with the Fiat/Abarth 124 Spider gone, there’s the Mazda MX-5, and that’s about it. The Cyberster will be an all-electric answer to what would have happened had the MGF/TF never gone out of production, and it looks great. And for anyone wondering about whether it’s a rightful heir to that particular throne – it’s been designed by a team of Brits, too.

It could have been a clean break but MG’s also given its slick social media teaser the straplineReturn of the Legend, which sounds like a rejected title for a Marvel sequel. It also means that it’s asking us to make sure we slot the Cyberster right alongside the MGA, the MGB, the Midget and the MGF the instant it’s launched, and means it will have to drive at least as well as a properly-sorted Midget MkIII from the moment it crunches off the gravel driveway. In other words, it’ll have to be brilliant because MG’s said that its own legend, carefully curated over nearly a century of delicately-honed roadsters, is returning.

But I’m not worried. Put it this way – everyone thought Daniel Craig would have a tough gig donning a tuxedo but Casino Royale was still a cracking film. No pressure, MG

A big celebration for a remarkable little car

FOR a car that’s fewer than ten feet long and a shade over five feet wide, the Austin Seven is remarkably big. 

Last week the plucky motoring pioneer celebrated its centenary with a five-day rally down in Gloucestershire that brought 1000 of them together. Having been to similarly sized shindigs for Mazda MX-5s and old Citroëns before, I know that mustering a four-figure turnout for any type or model of car is a big achievement, but this was all for a model that went out of production before the Second World War. Its outing as a brand-new motor was so long ago even my grandmother won’t remember it. Yet I can’t think of any car – and that includes the Mini, the Morris Minor, and the Ford Cortina – that’s done so much to put Britain on wheels. 

The Seven wasn’t the first mass-produced car (and if we’re being pedantic about it, the Ford Model T wasn’t either), but it was the first here that was sufficiently cheap and abundant enough to persuade petrolheads that it was four wheels, not motorcycles with sidecars, that were the future. It launched the careers of Lotus founder Colin Chapman, Mini designer Sir Alec Issigonis and race ace Bruce McLaren. BMW based its earliest four-wheel offering, the Dixi, on the Seven, and so did Swallow Sidecars, which a few decades and various models, became Jaguar. So the iPace, McLaren 720S, Lotus Emira, BMW iX and every current MINI all owe at least part of their existence to the Seven. 

And the Seven itself, for a car that was officially killed off 83 years ago, keeps on going. It is, thanks to a small army of specialists dedicated to restoring and making bits for the cars, a regular fixture in classic race and rally events to this day, and it isn’t people old enough to have owned them from new enjoying them either. There are plenty of twentysomethings, who’d otherwise be spending their weekends on TikTok, happily sliding about most Sundays in Sevens at Vintage Sports Car Club Events. There are people who polish Sevens within an inch of their lives and take them to shows, and those who ship them off to South America and go exploring with them. Because the Seven faded from popular memory long before most of us were born, it’s sort of become this blank canvas that appeals to everyone, of all ages and walks of life. 

Including those on a budget. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all classic cars have rocketed in value and are hand-crafted from unobtainium, but a Seven can be up and running and in your garage for…about five grand, which is secondhand Fiesta money. It’s also, because so many of them have survived, just about the only pre-war car that regularly pops up in the classified ads, so it won’t take long to find a good one, and you can still get bits for them. 

The Seven is a survivor unlike any other. Happy birthday, old chum! 

Is it too hot to hold car shows?

DUE TO the extreme heat conditions, this week’s column has been cancelled. 

Just kidding, although for an awful lot of people the record temperatures of the past few days have been no joke. I’m not sure about you, but I’ve spent most of it with the curtains drawn reading up on whether it’s a good idea to hang wet towels over your windows, fending off emails from Machine Mart about the air conditioners it’s flogging and watching Dominic Raab discuss whether it’s a sensible idea to shut the schools or not. 

But then I started hearing from event organisers who were calling things off because it was simply too hot, which is a first in my long career as a car show junkie. I’ve heard of motoring celebrations being called off because of inclement conditions (including a couple where the venues have been flooded by nearby rivers the night before) or because it’s too windy (including one in Cambridgeshire, where the organisers rightly decided that having an entire field’s worth of precarious-looking stalls wobbling around in gale-force winds wasn’t a good idea). Pulling a show because it’s too hot and sunny, though? That’s a first for me, at least in this country. 

Over the past two weekends I’ve been to two big shows that went ahead in temperatures of least 30-degrees Celsius and in both cases exactly the same thing happened; at about 2pm loads of classic car owners decided they’d had enough of the heat, got into their Triumph Heralds and simply headed home, regardless of the fact their cars were meant to stay on as exhibits for another two hours. I also reckon it has an effect on the paying punters too, because years ago one of the organisers of the Tatton Park show in Cheshire told me that if the weather’s really nice, people who’d normally spend the day ogling E-types will set their satnavs for Southport or Blackpool instead. 

Most of the shows I’m aware of chose to go ahead, even with the Met Office’s rare red warning of an extreme heat alert, but the fact that a couple did choose to call theirs off is an eye-opener because it’s so rare. It matters because shows are such a big part of Britain’s motoring hobby, they invariably happen on summer weekends and the science is fairly unanimous that temperatures like these will occur more often in future. So we’d better get used to the debate over whether to call off outdoor events – including car shows – or not. 

Which is where whoever succeeds Boris can step in. In much the same way event organisers and we, the wider public, looked to the government to give us guidance as to what was appropriate and what wasn’t during the pandemic, so it’s in Whitehall’s interest on public health grounds to look at the facts, weigh up the risks and advise what’s safe and what isn’t in 40-degree heat. 

Don’t leave it to event organisers to second-guess. Oh, and if you are planning to drop the roof on your MX-5 or MGB while it’s still scorching, don your best hat and slap on some sunscreen. You’ll thank me for it. 

RUSSIA is making rubbish cars again

Sanctions, and the subsequent shortage of bits required to bolt together proper ones, has made sure of it. 

For those of you old enough to remember Lada jokes there’s a comforting circularity to it, so we might as well bring any younger Champion readers right up to speed by trotting a few out. What do you call a Lada with a sunroof? A skip. How do you double a Lada’s value? By filling it up. Why do Ladas have heated rear windows? To keep your hands warm when you’re pushing them. Ha ha, boom boom, etc, etc. 

But it wouldn’t surprise me if that last one is no longer applicable if the dreadful conflict in Ukraine rages on much longer, because the reason why the Lada Granta Classic is so laughably awful is because it doesn’t come equipped with things that you take for granted on a new car – things like ABS or airbags, for instance. The story goes that after Vladmir Putin’s decision to send troops towards Kyiv the subsequent sanctions meant that Lada production had to stop altogether, and then-owner Renault quickly sold-up as Western companies quickly got shot of their Russian outfits. So the home brewed solution was simply to put the Granta back into production without the missing bits. 

You won’t want one not just because it doesn’t meet current UK safety rules and thus can’t be sold here, and would breach all sorts of Ukraine-related sanctions if it did, and even if you did somehow get to Moscow and slapped down a deposit at a Lada dealer I wouldn’t recommend it because – and this is not another Lada joke – you have to sign a written waiver promising not to leave the Russian Federation.  

In fact, the only reason you’d want one is because it’s Russia’s cheapest new car – a Focus-sized five-door hatch that in pound sterling works out at just under ten grand. Compare that to the UK’s current cheapest new car, the Kia Picanto, a titchy city car that starts at £12,250 (although it does meet UK safety rules, to be fair). Want something a bit bigger? The Dacia Sandero starts at £12,595. Thanks partly to the cost of living crisis, our insistence on more tech and carmakers largely giving entry-level offerings a steer because they’re less profitable, the days of truly cheap cars like the Perodua Nippa and Nissan Pixo are gone. 

Well, they are unless you count the Citroën Ami, which I know a lot of people don’t because it’s a tiny electric two-seater that can just about crack 28mph. With a range of 47 miles and a tiny boot I doubt it’d make much sense if your daily commute involves belting along the M62 to Manchester and back every day, but if you only pop to the shops a couple of times a week it might just work, because it’s now by far the UK’s cheapest new car. To lease one you’d need to put down a £2500 deposit, but after that the bill to Citroën is £19.99 a month. My mobile phone costs more than that! 

I’ll level you with you. On account of being classed as a light quadricycle rather than a car the Ami doesn’t come with airbags or ABS either, but it’s a lot safer than wobbling around on a scooter, which is the market that Citroen’s after, and you do get a shiny new vehicle with a warranty chucked in. 

Also, you don’t have to sign a written waiver promising not to leave Boris Johnson’s Britain if you order one. 

Hurrah! MG’s making exciting cars again

MG is back. Even though, I suspect, you hadn’t realised it’d been away. 

Yes, I know that last year MG was Britain’s fastest growing car manufacturer and right now it can sell you four different models – six if you start counting all the separate hybrid and all-electric spinoffs. Nope, you don’t need to remind me that the octagon-badged cars you can buy today can trace their roots back to the original Morris Garages operation, which next year celebrates its centenary. Or that you can now buy MGs from more than 150 dealers, dotted around the country. Hardly the muted whisper of a marque that’s dropped below the radar. 

But now MG is back in the proper sense – as in a carmaker that upsets the applecart by bringing out models that look good and go like stink. About time, chaps. 

The MG4 is China’s answer to the Volkswagen ID3 and the second-generation Nissan LEAF, which means it’s all-electric and brings a 280-mile range to the party. That’s a worthy contribution to Britain’s lunge towards net zero, but not what pricks up the hairs of someone who’s driven countless MGs over the years and spent nine years savouring the bass-rich burble of an MGB GT. Nope, it’s the fact that while the initial launch versions will perform respectably enough, when the range-topper eventually arrives it will have the zero emissions equivalent of – wait for it – 443bhp.  

That’s more than you get from a Mercedes-Benz A45 AMG or an Audi RS3, meaning that the hottest MG4 will be the quickest MG since the SV supercar of the early Noughties. The MG4 also uses all-new underpinnings aimed at giving a perfect 50/50 weight distribution and all the power gets sent to the back wheels, not the front – the sales pitch BMW used to use to justify its “Ultimate Driving Machine” strapline before it went all sensible and started flogging you the 2-Series Active Tourer. In a nutshell, it has the potential to outgun a Golf R and keep Greenpeace happy. 

Of course, VW is working on a hot version of its ID3 too – a GTI model in all but name – but it’s great to see the MG badge actually being slapped onto something truly deserving of its sporty credentials. Sure, it isn’t a two-seater roadster (don’t worry, they’re working on it) but I love the idea of the MG4 being a sort of Metro Turbo for zero emissions millennials. It’s even easy on the eye; it’s not quite as striking as, say, a Kia EV6, but it makes the latest MG5 look Paleolithic by comparison. 

So welcome back, MG, and best of British with making quick, exciting cars again. All you have to now is follow the lead of Jaguar and Bentley and start remaking some of your old classics too. I’ll have an MGB GT V8 in Damask Red, please… 

BMW’s new M3 Touring had better take a step back

So too should Ferrari’s SF90 Spider. The undoubted star of the Goodwood Festival of Speed was…. a 1990s family saloon that just happens to cost half a million quid. 

For all the horsepower on show at Britain’s highest profile celebration of high octane machinery – including a 30^th anniversary celebration of Nigel Mansell’s F1 championship win – the car that got most tongues wagging was ostensibly an old Subaru Impreza. If you aren’t fluid in petrolhead this would be a bit like your dad stepping into the ring and knocking out Tyson Fury, but it really did happen. Only this time, it was your dad with Marvel-esque superpowers. 

The Prodrive P25, built by the same Oxfordshire company that created Subaru’s rally cars, is a recreation of the 22B, the fastest, hairiest Impreza of them all – except that it’s harder, faster, more aggressive. I was a 12-year-old when the original Subaru Impreza 22B came out – and this actually looks like an Impreza that a 12-year-old would draw. It’s still an Impreza, but every detail is that little bit more extreme than Subaru ever envisaged. 

Yes, underneath it’s a 24-year-old Japanese car but the boot, bonnet, roof, sills, bumpers, and the stop-me-officer rear wing are all made of carbon composite to ensure it weighs roughly the same as a Ford Fiesta. It still has an Impreza’s flat-four engine too, but as it’s now churning out 400bhp and has the same launch control you get on the latest World Rally Championship cars, it’ll hit 60mph in 3.5 seconds. It looks the part too, because all of the cosmetic tweaks are courtesy of the same man who styled the McLaren F1. The price of the Impreza that until now only existed in the back of my high school maths book? £460,000. Plus VAT. 

That is, to save you doing the maths, £552,000, or 19 brand new Subaru XVs. It’s also three times the cost of a showroom fresh Ferrari Portofino and – if we’re being really pedantic about Japanese performance metal – twice the price of a Subaru Impreza 22B, the rally-inspired classic that the new P25’s based on. Not that Prodrive’s going to worry about the price putting potential buyers off, seeing as it’s only building 25 of them. 

Apply any kind of logic and asking half a million quid for a re-imagined Subaru is bonkers – but then selling bits of canvas with some artily-applied brush strokes on them at millions of pounds a throw doesn’t really add up either. Car nuts aren’t logical creatures, which is probably why watching a cartoonishly beefed-up Subaru Impreza blatting its way up the hill at Goodwood seemed to capture everyone’s imagination this year. 

I know it makes a sense and I’ll never, ever be able to afford one, but I’m glad the P25 exists somewhere other than my high school maths book.