TOPS NEWS – August 2004
The Italian police have been given a Lamborghini
sports car to help them catch crooks – the car is a gift from the manufacturers
and reputedly worth £100,000.
BMW lost its high court appeal that the C1 was a motorbike with a
roof and therefore a rider did not have to wear a helmet.
The Earls Court exhibition hall, which was the home of the Motor
Show for many years, has been sold with the Olympia site and Clarion Events
business for £245m to St James Capital and Nomura International.
Ten years ago there were 21,000 petrol sales forecourts in the UK. Now there are only 10,000. Last year 890
forecourts closed. There are five
million more cars on our roads than there were ten years ago but due to the
fuel efficiency of modern cars the fuel sales have remained the same.
Essex motorists were issued with 213,861 speeding
tickets last year compared with 4,799 in Gloucestershire.
Westminster Council issued 976,476 fines last year,
more than any other Council. A total of
5.3 million parking fines were issued in London. When Ken Livingstone became London’s mayor in 2000, the subsidy
for buses was almost £90m, this year it will reach £600m which works out at 9p
km or 35p per passenger. Outside London
2,156,813 parking tickets were issued in 2003 and in Birmingham 164,055.
A new 2CV club has been formed in Paris to take visitors around the City.
Roger Puttnam, Chairman of Ford GB, has given a warning that the new EU
directives on vehicles e.g. control of chemicals, safety and recycling, will
add £3,340 to the price of an average car.
Mrs Buell-Wilson was awarded £200 million against Ford (California) after her
Ford Explorer rolled over four times after she swerved. She was left paralysed. Other 4x4 manufacturers are concerned by the
judgement.
Winchester, Canterbury,
Cambridge and York now exclude new home owners from applying for
residential parking permits around developments with no off-street
parking. In Winchester, the rights to a
parking permit which cost £15 p.a., can add £10,000 to the value of a home. Annual parking in a multi-storey costs
£700-£735 with £480 charged at the railway station.
A new military radio system is jamming remote-control garage
doors in communities near the Florida Panhandle base. During recent testing of
the $5.5 million two-way radio system at Eglin, nearby homeowners reported that
their garage door openers failed to work.
Lord Hesketh, the former boss of the Hesketh F1 team, is selling his
family's ancestral home at Easton Neston, near Silverstone. The estate, which
once acted as the headquarters of the Hesketh F1 team, is for sale at £44m. It
has been the home of the Hesketh family for 470 years. The 3000 acre estate includes the main
house, the Towcester Racecourse, five lodges, three farms and the entire village
of Hulcote. Hesketh said that the
annual loss running the estate is between £440,000 and £1.28m.
Do not trust a man with a fast car. Porsche drivers are less faithful than any other group of
car owners, with almost 50% of them cheating on their partners Men's Car
has revealed. Among German men, Porsche drivers were the least faithful, with
49% admitting infidelity followed by BMW drivers at 46%. Among women, Audi drivers were the least
reliable, 41% admitting to affairs. The most faithful group were owners of
Opel-Vauxhall cars, with only 31% of male and 28% of female drivers in Germany
having committed adultery.
Remember the Rainbow barn, painted by farmer Thomas Wharton
when he was refused planning permission?
His council ordered it to be repainted in dark green or grey but the
magistrates’ court overturned the order agreeing that the council had no power
to restrict the colour. It is good to
hear the end of a story. Does anyone
know what happened to the Belgian nuns who, a couple of years ago, sold their
convent and disappeared in fast expensive cars with their gardener?
Motorists were stranded for four hours on the A420 near
Oxford last week when 1,000 chickens escaped on the dual carriageway after a
collision between a lorry and three cars. Stallholders from the game fair at Blenheim Palace helped the
RSPCA to capture the birds.
The Used Car Buyer magazine claims that a new car
loses an average of £21.40 per day during its first six months. Luxury models lose £108 per day.
Coys has announced that an external fire spread into their
Collectors’ Department and other Warehouses, causing damage to a number of Lots
entered in their Chiswick House auction.
They now have another warehouse.
However they may also have to look for a new showroom as Jeffery
Pattinson owns the Queensgate Mews Lease and again says he is not inclined to
renew it next year.
Motors TV (Sky 413) recently changed history with the
comment that the SSK Mercedes was designed by Caracciola.
Robert Ellis (ex VSCC and Rockingham) has now left H&H
auctions which he joined earlier in the year.
He is to pursue free-lance
journalism and is working with the Aston Martin Heritage Trust.
Promauto, formerly Promocourse, who were involved with the Reims debacle, have
told the Historic Rally Car Register and Classic Rally Tours that the name
‘Classic Rally’ has been registered in France and they will sue anyone who uses
the words ‘Classic Rally’ or ‘Tour’ in their title. The Classic Rally
Association who are due to run a rally to Norway and call it the ‘Viking
Classic’ have been told that ‘Viking’ is not acceptable in the title. The AC de
Monaco advised the CRA some years ago that the words ‘Monte Carlo’ could not
appear in the title of an event. There
are rumours that the Swiss Rally des Alpes claim rights to ‘Alpine Rally’ and
that ‘Alpenfart’ has also been registered.
(FBHVC).
The VSCC June Bulletin stated that the HGPCA had recently relaxed their rules governing eligibility for Cooper Bristols and that Roger Ballard had been appointed to ‘address matters with the car owners’.
Dealerships in almost all parts of the country charge hourly labour rates of more than £100 compared with a garage trade national average of £57. The most expensive was a BMW specialist in Chelsea at £153 per hour according to a survey by Warranty Direct.
BMW’s next generation Mini will be built from a more flexible platform which will support four or five different body styles. While BMW plans to redesign its 'retro' Mini, Volkswagen has ruled out redesigning the new Beetle. Brandes, the secretive US investment house managing funds of £45.5 billion has increased its stake in Volkswagen from 6% to 10.65%. Brandes tends to buy into companies which it considers as trading below their value. VW has been suffering from poor sales in Europe and disappointment with the new Golf model.
If a vehicle can be parked so that both wheels are suspended above the ground it cannot be given a parking ticket according to a recent Court appeal by a company making a scooter stand which allows riders to park on a pavement without the wheels touching the ground.
The TVR sports car manufacturer has been sold to Russian Nikolai Smolensky (24) who is the country’s youngest rouble billionaire. TVR’s Blackpool factory makes 800 cars a year and employs 400 people.
The Endurance Rally Association organiser Philip Young has been fined £2,000 plus £1000 costs by the MSA for routing the World Cup Rally and Sahara Challenge through France without consent from the French ASN. The ERA chairman was also fined £2,000. Both men were banned from organising any competitive motor sport event for one year.
Honda has recalled 8,200 of its 2004 motorcycles because a computer glitch causes the speedometer to understate the vehicle speed by c 25%.
Intelligent road studs are now in use at junction 6 of the
M8 in Lanarkshire. They can sense rain,
fog, ice and average speeds.
Officials in Sant Anastasia, Italy are handing out free
motorbike helmets in an effort to stop the huge number of deaths on the roads.
More than 100 helmets have been given out so far this year.
Renault has launched a new car called the Dacia (Logan). It will go on sale in Romania for just
£3,200. Ford sold 317,471 new cars and trucks
last month. GM sales increased to 446,787
units, Mercedes down 9.4%.
Peugeot have been forced to issue a press release stating that
their new 1007-mini-MPV must be called the “one thousand and seven” and not the
“one-double-o-seven”.
Entrants in the BRDC 50s sportscar support race at the British GP
(entry fee £750) had to practice early on Friday morning and race late on
Sunday afternoon after the GP. During
the sportscar race no media TV coverage was available - even for the
commentator. 195,000 spectators attended over the two days but the tannoy was
unintelligible in many places and not all the big screens were working even
during the GP. Ecclestone’s wife
Slavica, endeared herself to some viewers when she told Brundle that his grid
walkabout prior to GPs was boring.
The French government is considering plans to introduce a
“sin tax” of up to £2,300 for thirsty 4x4s and large luxury cars which account
for 17.3% of the French market and are not made by French manufacturers. The foreign makers are expected to challenge
the proposed law at the EU commission because it amounts to discrimination.
All vehicles towing trailers, caravans or horse-boxes are
restricted to the inside lane for a 2-mile uphill stretch on the M5 near
Bristol on Friday 4pm-8pm and Saturday 8am-2pm throughout August.
Vintage Motorsport is an American magazine covering
historic cars - it is well produced with good articles about the main European
events and useful spares and sales advertising. www.vintagemotorsport.com
Kyalami racing circuit has been sold for $7.1m. The new owners are
a consortium of businessmen and property developers. Talks are taking place for the construction of a major new racing
facility on New York's Staten Island on a 440-acre site. The plan is to
build a 2.5 mile race track, which would be similar in size to the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway. Proposed alterations to
the Spa-Francorchamps track would create three new layouts, two of which
could be used at the same time. The Grand Prix de l’Age d’Or will move to the Dijon
circuit next year. Aintree will have a ‘race’ demonstration in
November on the 3-mile Grand Prix circuit which has not changed much since its
use in the fifties. They hope to
attract EU funding to resurrect it in time for 2005 - the 50th anniversary of
the first British Grand Prix.
Oludayo Adeagbo, 25, an English property consultant
and head of a London gang, has been found guilty of stealing more than 70
luxury cars. A policeman had noticed a
Porsche Boxter, Jaguar, BMW etc. parked at night outside council flats where
the gang lived. Adeagbo was jailed for
2 years.
TOPS NEWS is an abridged version of one section of the
TOPS magazine sent to members.
Trisha Pilkington