TAG | bangers4ben
Our trusty Carina went to auction at Blackbush today along with most of the fellow challengers. We couldn’t be there in person, but the Bangers4BEN guys were Tweeting the results and.. she only went for £190.
Yes, that is £90 more than we paid, but it was still disappointing. Even damaged Carinas are going for £300 or more on eBay so our expectations were higher. The limitation with auctions is that it all depends who is there on the day. Evidently there were no cabbies in the crowd at Blackbush for Carinas are a favourite of theirs and LINTO had another 100,000 late night, city centre miles in her.
The upside of the auction is no hassle having to wait for buyers to call, etc.. Still, £190 feels like a missed opportunity except for whoever bought it. They got a bargain.
All the money for the car, plus the £250 entry fee, went to BEN. With almost 30 teams, some of whom achieved four digit sale figures at auction today – the key thing is we raised some cash for a good cause and had some fun along the (very long) way.
Thanks for following our little adventure. There is already talk of a bigger and better Bangers4BEN in 2010. Despite today’s disappointment, I am sure we’ll be there.
Scott
We have to be honest; today was fairly dull.
Once we had woken everyone at the Travelodge up early – 7:30am – by setting off the Carina’s alarm (sorry! Now realise that unlocking the boot with the key does not disarm the system) we set off down the A1 to the A1M to the M1 to the M42 to the M40 to the M25… you get the picture.
It was dual carriageway or motorway for the whole 400 odd miles and the car just loves cruising along the motorway. It should be no surprise for it was designed and sold in the boom time of the UK company car/fleet market, its main purpose in life being to convey reps rapidly up and down the highways of Britain. Today, on familiar roads in broad daylight, our sole task became watching the hours and miles countdown to the finish at Brooklands.
We're here!! Its been a long 1436 miles but we've made it completely intact!
We think we were first to arrive for it was only after some time posing the car for some snaps on the famous banking that we spotted any of the others. There were no prizes for being first, this was emphatically not a race, but being early did allow us to have a wander around the museum before the formality of the closing laps and prize giving.
On the banking at Brooklands
I was happy to watch Christian drive the course, a mature, magnanimous gesture made less praiseworthy when I confess to using the opportunity to get myself a nice mug of tea.
LINTO laps for laughs
Parade laps over, we gathered to hear that fellow PR teams from Hyundai and Honda had won the prizes for best livery and Twittering during the event. Well deserved in both cases – the Honda guys even went swimming at John O’Groats – and once hands were shaken we made a swift exit to try and miss the worst of the rush hour traffic.
Of course, the real end of the story is next week when the cars go for auction. At just £100 purchase price our old Carina has a bit of a head start over some of the others in making a profit. Let’s see how it goes.
Cruise control is a great way to take some of the stress out of long motorway journeys, especially sections with road works and average speed cameras.
The A1M we are driving down this morning has a lot of seemingly endless road works. The Carina does not have cruise control.
Despite a night in the cold and damp the Carina started on the first turn of the key. I shouldn’t be surprised, but little dependable touches like that feel reassuring when you are a long way from home.
- Rigs in the calm of the Cromarty Firth
The run up to John O’Groats is an easy one from a navigational point of view as there is only one road. The A9 unfolds along the eastern coastline, the North Sea always visible to the right as we drive. Oil rigs are just visible on the horizon, some burning off gas, the only spot of colour against the greyness. Smooth, flowing and in better condition than most roads around Surrey, the route offers some unique sights, not least deserted cottages (surely not remnants of the Highland Clearances?) and oil rigs moored up in the inlets, a few seemingly huddled together for warmth. The laws of physics dictate they will float, but it is still hard not to wonder at how such enormous steel, bar stool shaped things can sit on the surface.
- Nimrod!
As we near Wick, the last recognisable town this far north, we are treated to the sight of a RAF Nimrod taking off from the nearby Leuchars air base. It circles low and our last sight of it is almost head on, landing lights ablaze as it makes a pass over Wick. Built to detect incoming Cold War Soviet bombers, it predates all the cars on the Bangers4BEN run by decades. Old is a relative term even for machines.
When we reach John O’Groats the sense of anti-climax is unavoidable. A grey sky covers grey buildings surrounding an almost empty car park. Souvenir shops, visually indistinguishable from the (not free) toilet block are inviting only in contrast to the icy looking sea only yards away. Commercialisation means the once famous road sign is only brought out for a fee. No one here today is inclined to pay.
- The drab reality of John O’Groats
Weather transforms this place. In summer sun it has a rugged beauty, the nearby islands appearing to be much closer than they are: In heavy winds, the sea is whipped up to all sorts of drama. Today it is cloudy and still and dank, urging us to head south again as soon as possible. However, the needs of media hold us a while longer as the photographer tries to shepherd a bunch of over caffeinated car dealers into some sort of photogenic array.
Christian pleased to be in John O'Groats - and pleased to be leaving soon
Then it’s back the way we came, literally, and on down through the glens to skirt Edinburgh and on to England – just. We overnight in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
We arrived in Inverness almost exactly 12 hours after we left Ascot. Given that we stopped a few times and took the scenic route via central Glasgow (a mistake) and the Loch Lomond road (deliberate) that is not too bad a time to do 580 miles.
The choice to come the scenic route was mine based on years of previous experience of and liking for the roads. The run from Dumbarton to Inverness has got to be one of the best driving routes in the UK. Of course, daylight adds considerably to its charm, but sadly that had deserted the sky before we got through Glasgow. In my mind I could still picture the hills, glens, lochs and castles, but poor Christian had to make-do with my rather inadequate descriptions. I promise to bring him back in Summer sometime.
LINTO, our £100 Carina E cruised up the motorway as fast as we wanted and belted through the Highland roads with nothing to alarm except perhaps the fear of old suspension on budget tyres and damp roads. Compared to a modern car the headlights are a bit dimmer and the brakes less powerful, but in terms of comfort, quietness and pace we were little worse off than if we had been in my wife’s Prius.
Taking into account time spent getting to the start we were in the car for nearly 14 hours, but we both emerged feeling relatively unstressed and relaxed. The lack of tiredness can be gauged by the fact that only now, at gone 1.00am, have we returned to the room and remembered to do this blog post.
So, am I saying a 15 year old, 151,000 mile Carina is as good as a brand new, £20,000 Prius?
In some ways, yes it is. It has carried us several hundred miles safely and comfortably with barely a sniff of trouble. Of course the new car is better, more lavishly equipped with air con and in car entertainment for example, but if you could only afford a “banger” it is reassuring to know that in terms of basic functionality you are not much worse off than the driver of the new, more expensive car.
Of course, my view might change if we get a mechanical problem that strands us miles from anywhere in the wind and rain.
Scott
It seemed a simple enough challenge; buy an old car for less than £250, drive it 1,500 miles to John O’Groats and back then sell it at auction for as much as possible, the winner being the team that made most money over the purchase price with all the cash going to charity.
So it was in a mood of misplaced confidence that I entered the Bangers4BEN charity banger rally a few months ago. I was not alone – there are 30 teams in total, mostly car dealers, but also entries from rival manufacturers. Now there was pride at state.
I initially harboured a romantic notion of finding a nice old Camry, an executive car packed with the usual goodies of air con, cruise control and a nice stereo to entertain me as I cruised along, enjoying Toyota’s bomb-proof reliability on the 1,500mile trip. I soon discovered that finding a vaguely working Toyota of any type for under £250 was more of a challenge than I had imagined. Several weeks of searching revealed an obvious truth: if you have a reliable, comfortable old car, why would you sell it?
I had a rethink, lowered my expectations and targeted Carina E models. The logic (okay, post-rationalisation) was that this was the first Toyota built in the UK, it is far from being regarded as a sought after classic and there were loads of them about. Trouble is, as any late night reveller will tell you – in my case my teenage step-children – the Carina E is the provincial cabby’s car of choice. Stumble out of a night club and call a cab home in the early hours and the chances are it will be a Carina E, precisely because of their reputation for seeing off a few hundred thousand miles with no dramas. These attributes also made it the perfect car for Bangers4BEN and if we could just find a nice one before a cabbie snapped it up we’d be sorted. It was then fate played her hand in our favour.
I was at our technical centre bemoaning my lack of luck finding anything, worried that time was running out, when I learned that one of Toyota’s own technicians had a Carina E he was looking to sell. He had not got around to doing anything about it and, happy to be free of the hassle of advertising it and dealing with potential buyers, he named his price of £100. A deal was done there and then and so LINTO became our car.
Now, hindsight makes it seem obvious that buying a car from a Toyota technician is clearly a good thing because LINTO needed nothing done to it. However, since the idea was to auction this car at the end of the rally to raise as much as possible for charity we fitted new tyres, gave it a new MoT and a clean the like of which it hadn’t known since it left the showroom 15 years ago. The paintwork gleans, the interior is immaculate and it drives…
Well, it drives like a 15 year old car that has done 151,000 miles. That is to say, not like a new car and over the three days of the event we will report on life with an old car (it seems terribly harsh to call it a banger) and how it compares with cars of today. You might not think much has changed in a decade and a half, but it has.
Scott
