Fantastic day at Tatton Park Performance & Sports Car show. 13 out of 15 cars showed up, including a familiar LM 500 with new owner Emma, and Colin who had driven all the way up from Bournemouth… Good effort! Bloody glad I took the ‘event shelter’ because it was baking hot. Then it was time to catch up with everyone.

Favourite daughter also came along & was fab all day,  albeit at a cost! 😂

Every little helps!

All in all a great day & well worth a few hours (OK quite a few… I never said I was good at it) on Saturday of washing & polishing. Although I admit to drawing the line at waxing.

Hurrah she’s back! And OF COURSE it hasn’t been as sunny as when I didn’t have the car!… 😂

Very excited this morning! Oh yes… Going down to pick the Mantis up after THREE WEEKS down at Redline. (I had given Joe a list of things as long as my arm to be fair!). The plan was to get the train down to Trowbridge via Bristol where Joe was picking me up to take me back to Redline & run through everything he’s done on the car. However, never a dull moment with anything to do with the Marcos… Before I have even got on the train I discovered that someone had lot drunk, pinched a tractor & taken out a bridge near Cheltenham so there is major service disruption. Argh! So I will be two hours late getting to Redline with poor old Jeremy & Joe losing a chunk of their Saturday afternoon. That said, Jeremy sent me the invoice last night so I know he’ll be pleased to see me! However I am chomping at the bit to get the car back & check out the changes. The added suspense will only serve to make the reunion all the sweeter…

Ordered new boots for the car today, to be fitted while the car is down at Redline. Having seriously considered the Continental Sport Contact 5s (which have trumped the other tyres in group tests last three years), I couldn’t get them in 265s for the rear so decided to go for latest generation of my current tyres; Goodyear Eagle F1 Asymmetric 3s. Hoping the wet driving & braking has improved. 😉.

Also talked to Joe at Redline who’s working on the car (good chap!), who told me that Protech couldn’t supply new shocks for at least two months 😕, which is obviously no good for me as I need the car back. Shocks are pitted, but he’s agreed they will recon the existing piston rods & seals at no charge, & we’ll get the shocks done properly when the car is there next. The list has started already!

Did anyone get the D&G reference in the title? I suspect not… 😉

I finally got the car down to Jeremy & Joe at Redline Sportscars today, with a long list of things to be done, top of the list being the two oil leaks. I was delighted to have my son along for company & having left Home about 0830 we made good time all the way down to Wilts, the only delays being motorway roadworks rather than traffic. The car behaved impeccably & I was glad to have a working stereo with 3.5 hours driving (not much scope for chatting with the top down & exhaust growling away!). We drove through the odd rain shower without complaint from his highness, even though there was enough water to fill up the door handle recesses… 😂

When we got to Redline it was a pleasant surprise to find many of the Essex group there as one of them was considering buying a car off Jeremy & had arrived mob handed with Marcos experts. The car looked lovely to me but the eagle eye of Mr Partridge spotted a few things of course. A sale was agreed however & nice to have another Marcos off to a new owner rather than languishing in a garage somewhere. My son liked the look of it too but tragically doesn’t get sufficient pocket money to afford a classic sports car aged 11 years.

Having fully briefed Joe we jumped on  train back to Wilmslow & were home just over 11 hours after leaving. Fingers crossed Joe doesn’t find anything major (or expensive!) & I can collect the car in a couple of weeks.

Excited! Just booked tickets for the UK’s fifth International Concourse in early September at… Windsor Castle, & part of the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations! How cool is that! Organised by the MOC (Well done again John B) with a dinner on the Saturday evening beforehand. Should be great fun & looking forward to doing it all with my son accompanying me. An adventure all round then.

On a less cheery note the oil leak has got worse & I’ve had to top up almost from scratch again. A trip to Redline for Joe Cubitt to look at it (and many other things) is planned for next Friday & can’t come soon enough.

In a moment of madness I decided that I can’t live with the new Alpine head unit with a slot for CDs that I am never going to use but will inevitably attract dust & rain with the top down. So… I acquired the equivalent model without the CD function & swapped the new one out for an even newer one.

Everything seems fine so I just need to get MCA to fit working DAB & FM aerials (& resecure the new amp which has fallen off the transmission tunnel wall in the passenger footwell! 😔). And I  am getting used to the new buttons. 😛

So the trusty Nakamichi Amp has finally bitten the dust after many years of service. After a few hours hanging around the coffee shops of the A6, the Mantis now has a new head unit & CerwinVega B52 Class D Amp, courtesy of Manchester Car Audio. The HU is a top-of-the-range Alpine unit with DAB+ but… I prefer my old 2008 Alpine unit which has a better (higher resolution) display. I probably need to get used to the new unit, that’s all. Sound quality is first class & the Bluetooth phone functions are impressive; making/receiving phone calls was remarkably good using the Alpine supplied mike which was installed between the dash panels. On the downside, the DAB isn’t working which is a bit frustrating – it looks like the heated front screen is killing the signal off. Heigh ho! Phil at MCA is looking into alternatives, possibly mounted the DAB aerial on the rollbar. In the meantime since… October last year?… I have some music to listen to in the car, with the added bonus that about 40% of the passenger footwell has been reclaimed when the Nakamichi amp went. Marvellous!

After (not) much pondering I have applied via CMI for tickets for this year’s Le Mans Classic. I am indulging in some Track Laps, which seem to get more eye-wateringly expensive each time, & a couple of Grandstand tickets at Dunlop. A minor fly in the ointment being that my best chum from Uni, Si, has had to back out of coming along. This is rather unfortunate as Si knows a lot more about cars than most & it’s always rather fun wandering around somewhere like Le Mans with a walking encyclopedia with you! 😁. I’d be equally delighted to go over with Doug who came along as a ‘Le Mans Virgin’ in 2014 & was great value as ever. However Doug has picked up a chiquatita since then & is no longer the sole decision maker… 😉.