Stolen Japspeed Scooby Saved by Angels Road Angels

Regular readers may recall my small contribution to the internet phenomenon to hit the recent Performance Vauxhall Show. I knew all about the show, as the good guys at Pioneer had hooked us up with a sweet brace of pairs of tickets to give away to some lucky Talk Audio readers. The winning guys had a cool time but at the halfway point, on the Saturday night, a rocket went up.
For some idiot thieves had made off with the Japspeed Scooby drift car, the one supposed to be driven by Steve ‘˜Baggsy’ Biagioni. A fabulously loud and rorty-exhaust car with huge power and real driftability, it had been performing on the live arena with my mate Danielle Christie as M/c, doing colouring-in with rubber on the tarmac with his mates in the other Japspeed cars.
And there, half past six at night, was just a space where the car should have been Within minutes the Facebook accounts of car fans and PVS show-goers had the car shown as their profile shot and someone made a creditable ‘˜wanted’ poster. There were people videoing it on the M25 and in fact, the car was found and recovered within twelve hours of it going missing, near Reading. Somewhere in the home counties, a lass named Laura said, ‘They should have had one of our trackers on it.’ for she works on reception at a company called Road Angel.
Meanwhile, in Internet Land, I was on Facebook and couldn’t help but spot the story and added my two penn’orth, which was of course to ask why there was no tracking on the car? Mr. Japspeed (a bloke called Paul McCallum) answered and asked jokily if I was going to get them some, for free? To which I said, wittily. ‘yes’.
A couple of calls later to the guys at Road Angel (whose angelic PR has been quietly fabulously good to TA for years, now, helping me swag their products) and they, it seemed agreed that it would be good, now we have the horsepower back in the stable, to bolt the bloody door!
So, the car in question was towed down to Silverstone and the offices of Road Angel Group actually within the racetrack (and what a posh technology park it is, too, with businesses working in Formula One and so forth) and the Scooby was installed with a Road Angel trac-it system. This does updates every minute and you can check it at will, any time if you wish, as well as setting the system to send out its location once or twice a day as well. Of course, if it moves without authorisation i.e. without your key, then it shouts and starts sending out text messages and alerts to the owner.
It’s got the vital Thatcham accreditation and costs £399.99 fitted, including a year’s subscription to the Orange phone network-based SIM-alert system on board. After that, it’s £99.99 a year or £179.99 for two years further subs.
Here’s the interview


The device is self powered and if fitted inside something with no battery of its own, will last a full month before it needs any external charging. I gather it also sends out ‘˜low power alert’ texts to help look after itself, too.
Damn clever and now, fitted to the Japspeed Scooby. We understand that twenty thousand fans now read Japspeed’s pages on Facebook and they ran a competition to choose a bumper sticker slogan to put on the back of the car out of ten possible slogans. They got fifteen thousand votes in two days! The prize is to hang out with the Japspeed guys at a race meet for a whole weekend, which sounds cool.

Anyway, I was utterly chuffed to be able to help and while it was obviously enough of a needful thing to do that Road Angel’s receptionist Laura thought of it first, I still claim credit for hopefully starting off a long and lurve-filled relationship between Japspeed and Road Angel, as there is a whole team to look after, that even includes that chap Shane Lynch who sings with a little beat combo called Boyzone!
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