Donny in the Snow

The original show in Doncaster had become the first and best show of the year for all car types by the time I had learned about it. It was held at the old racecourse and always had a broad variety of nutters in attendance. Back then it was called the National Sports and Custom Show. It was where all the maddest hot rods, specials and even concours cars would turn up. The hardcore custom car boys with their metal flake paint and mad amounts of chrome. Cars up on ramps with lighting and mirrors underneath so you can see how all the bits that are normally oily are not.
I always said it was like when you let cows out of the barn in the spring and they are so happy that old heifers and wrinkly moos alike scamper and gambol with sheer joy. We would see cheerful military nutters in khaki with grubby US army jeeps. Skinheads with incredible airbrush jobs on their scooters. Elvis fans with quiffs and 1950’s Yank Tanks or custom Transit vans with button-quilted interiors. And then came the Turbo Nutter Bastards.
Us lot.
 
Yes, Doncaster became taken over by car clubs, mad hot hatches and all sorts of new enthusiasts, like Skyline owners. A soundoff was affixed to it and for well over a decade now, there has always been a serious contingent of the best sounding and loudest ice cars in all the UK to be found at the Donny show.

There were so many all-weekend show-goers that the show had become as highly rated by Doncaster’s city fathers as the Grand St. Leger meet itself. Donny town during the car show was a riot. Literally, sometimes. However, the place existed for the gee-gees and three years ago, a rebuild at the Doncaster Racecourse forced the show to move to its new location. They had more space, lots of tarmac to rip up and best of all, you could still call it the Donny show as it was moved to Castle Donnington racetrack in Derbyshire.
Now in its third year at the ‘new’ site, it is a different show. No skins, no Elvises and definitely no jar-heads. Just the purest incarnation of the lowered, the faster and the blingier. It’s also officially titled ISTS for International Styling & Tuning Show and does draw cars from all over northern Europe.
One loss I feel personally is the Live Action Arena, scene of jet car demos, stunt bikers and quad nutters, scantily clad Jakki and Leilani and most personally my own fat self as ringmaster to the likes of Russ Swift, Terry Grant, Craig ‘Ace’ Jones and others. Google ’em – I have worked with the best and had Grant drive over my toes. Which he can do accurately to less than an inch, so always missing say Jo Guest’s toes. Lucky job or risky lunacy? Both and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Although on a less nostalgic tip, I’m introducing monster trucks and a bikini contest this May at the Modified Nationals in Peterborough, so there is no fat lady singing here.
The sound off this year was run by EMMA (It was always an IASCA event before) and as well as their SQ contest, they also ran the EMMA SPL or ESPL competition for the first time. The latter is not nearly as mad as the stuff the dB Drag guys or the IASCA idBL lot get up to but is a lot of fun and allows the Otherwise Intimidated to dare to go get their car measured without getting humiliated by some dude next in line with ten decibels more than you.
There were some truly fabulous cars present on the audio front, with three Big Hairy Standouts. They were the simply incredible installs belonging to sound off ‘ledge’ Carlo Corbin and an engineer who has signed the official secrets act and makes Eurofighters. I know he is called Brian Petrie and that he is a gifted craftsman, technical designer and systems bloke as his car is as good as any I have ever seen in engineering terms but couldn’t answer any single question that I asked about how stuff in his car relates to his work.

He wasn’t being funny or pompous or anything but did tell me that he simply can’t begin to discuss it. ‘I’d lose my job and they’d lock me up.’ I wasn’t being smart-arsed about it, I was just curious about fighter jets and their control systems as some stuff does get into the public domain. We know that head-up displays were first used in military aircraft and I gather the incredible Alumapro-style crushed carbon dozen-Farad super-capacitor slabs are based on a device first used to clear fighter jets’ metalised inner screen coatings. Massive current, fast is good to demist in an instant if you are changing the climatic air mass you are flying through at close to Mach1
Anyway, Brian’s car is so clever he has had to make boxed duplicates of the finer installation details to show what he has installed for his points. Little things make the difference. Like his polished Aluminium power cable clamps. They look like a very posh factory item from somewhere. But he made them. The two microphones for his twin Alpine PXI-H990 processors are fitted into a disc-shaped item that again looks utterly factory, in the spot above his head and to the front where the power sunroof switch would be if he had one. (Nope, aircon) It’s all done to the Military Avionics standard he must be adhering to at work. The top bracket of all electronics for reliable excellence and function is Avionics (Becker are rightly famous because of this) and the top level of build quality is Military Specification (that’s what Mil Spec means, innit? Not millimetre-whateverdurrr. Which what I thought it meant when I was ten.)
So it is hardly surprising that Brian’s car is incredible. I have long had a theory that a profession shows in the car. Engineers are easy to spot. Sign makers use a lot of Perspex as they get it free, Eddie Farr is a cabinet maker and he once did a Formica-topped cuboid modernistic thing in his boot. It was angular perfection. The edge of the steepest angles joined looked like toffee in stripes, so accurately had he cut diagonally through the laminate.
Carlo’s install is proof that the lad is a bloody genius. The man, who stripped off his shirt to use the cloth for resin-coating while being filmed for a TV programme made about a nutty 48-hours-no-kip-till-yer-done competition called Installer Challenge, can do anything. Not only is the car sounding fabulous but it is also beautiful, too, with bubble-pattern airbrushing work to internal panels that he has done himself. He is quite puke makingly talented and yet has the mildest of temperaments and is totally self effacing.
The last vehicle made my nipples hurt with sheer excitement. (Sorry for those creative types amongst you who are now getting pictures in your heads that you just don’t want hey, this is the net)
It was the unbelievably silly and completely gorgeous Alpine RLS. Based on the most absurd Mercedes, the huge roofline and mad level of bodywork customisation that has been applied make this the most bonkers ride. The wheels are thirties. I was so impressed with the daft glorious nuttiness of the rubber band-rating to the tyres that I even photographed the bit of the tyre where is embossed in super-macro. The car has only two seats and no ‘real’ steering wheel.
It is steered with a central whanger and is utterly illegal for UK road use.
Although I did see it being driven to be put away on day one of the show. Each seat is attached to its own door and these rotate hydraulically to scissor the rear part inwards, the fore part outwards and so result in the seat being at 90 degrees to the interior so you can slide out.
 
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=706742962343334070
 
I made a video (above) of the seats motorising and also the rear amp rack extruding and simultaneously rotating. The car was designed and built to demonstrate the Alpine Imprint system but at the sort of show it was (especially with snow bucketing out of the heavens from time to time) it wasn’t a fit spot to demo how awesome Imprint is to one punter at a time. It is literally years and years ahead of where we can get to in the UK, as the investment is too big for our territory alone. In the USA this has been seen by a LOT of people and as soon as the ISTS show was over, it was off to Germany. Italy and Croatia are getting it, the rest of the continent’s Alpine outposts are fighting over who gets it next. This was a rare sighting but was one of the best things of the whole show for me.
There was an awfully large and enthusiastic contingent of dancing girls, who were provided with a pole by the Vibe folks’ rig. This had the sexy Vibe R8 parked in front of it. Apart from a race simulator on a truck next to the Ice Village it was brilliant. The simulator was flinging people about on a Formula One drive sim and a weedy cheap speaker was going ‘Ne-nee-ne-ne  Neeoooowww! Vroom!’ all day in a useless, tinny buzzy sort of a way. It was like a buzzing wasp disturbing the bass.
Fusion were there, as were Four, Kicker and Mutant (and how they hired dancers, not promo girls this time and they all grooved their butts off to keep warm. And I kept warm as toast just being nearby enough to film them for you so as to keep a Proper Record.)
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4340605611323164202
 
Kenwood were there too and I got a look at a brand new delivered DNX-8220BT. An utter double DIN flagship of a beast and so freshly installed into their car that Kenwood’s James Howe was still learning about it himself as he showed me through the brilliant EQ section. You can scroll a finger across a screen to ‘draw’ an EQ curve virtually via the touch screen, affecting all the faders, like it was a real analogue job like say, Sansui used to do. (Brownie points for anyone who can recall their amplifier’s part number) it is a very desirable item and we’ll get one to test ASAP.
 
So Donny was a blast and I loved it. It was the first time I’ve been able to go to report instead of graft for ages. The snow didn’t even seem to stop folks from coming but it was a nutty one, waking up to a blanket of white for day two of Donny. Mad. Who knows what the weather will bring us this season? See y’all at the Nats
 
And here’s where to click to see a funky cool slideshow in the newly imported gallery system. We LOVE this! If you go to the gallery itself from the menus above you can get at the fuller size versions of you want to nick any….
link