Keith Jones

By Keith Jones keithjones

Lincoln’s crying out for a sporting spectacular, something that will attract people in their tens of thousands and boost the city’s coffers by millions. How? By being bold and staging a Formula 1 race right here in the heart of Lincoln.

Jade Etherington’s awe-inspiring display in the recent Winter Paralympics has confirmed that Lincolnites have a desire to share and celebrate sporting glory. It’s not as if there’s much else to get excited about on the local sporting front. Do they even still play football down at Sincil Bank?

Anyway, I digress. Sochi itself is capitalising on its own legacy by hosting Russia’s first F1 race around the Olympic Park later this year. It’s not the only street circuit vying for attention either, with New Jersey almost there, and Rome, possibly even London in the pipeline. Every major city it seems wants to do their own take on Monaco.

So what can Lincoln offer that they can’t? A challenge. Listen to any interview with a top flight racing driver and what they relish most isn’t merely driving a car fast, it’s driving it on the very knife edge of what the conditions deem possible. We all know what it’s like threading a normal car around Lincoln’s streets – imagine doing it in something as powerful as a tornado that weighs as much as a wheelie bin.

Of course, it’s not as simple as dropping Bernie Ecclestone, the magnate behind modern F1, an email and inviting the sponsor-laden circus into town, work has to be done. And that’s where we all benefit. How? Well, firstly the roads all need to be up to scratch which means uneven ironworks and potholes become billiard-table smooth. Years of ordinary motorists’ complaints could be ironed out in a matter of days.

Not only do motorists benefit but pedestrians do too, as they’ll all be safer – all those miles of safety barriers and tyre walls will line the kerbsides for months prior to the event as they’re installed, as well as taking a few more weeks to dismantle afterwards. The inconvenience a small price to pay, really. Besides, those red and white raised kerbs on the corners make it easier to manoeuvre buggies and mobility scooters around too, don’t they?

It’d do wonders for tourism too when the race weekend isn’t on. The myriad of television cameras would capture all the special sights in the city: the Cathedral, the Castle, the neon lights at Wetherspoons…

Talking of the Cathedral, what better place to locate the pit lane than around the side of it, along the cobbles of Minster Yard. The cars could peel left as the circuit heads towards the chicane of Priory Gate for their necessary tyres swaps, before squeezing through Exchequer Gate and turning right at the White Hart.

Of course, all the teams’ trucks couldn’t be parked around the Cathedral – that wouldn’t be right, and besides, they’d get in the way of the sponsors’ logos draped down the sides of it. No, we’d have to increase the height of the entrance arch at the Castle and they can all park on the grass in there. The drivers could do autograph signings near a display of the Magna Carta to boost visitor numbers for that too.

Though there’s a problem in the name. There’s a bike race already called the Lincoln Grand Prix. We’d have to be fiendishly clever and call it the Grand Prix of Lincoln or something.

All I need to do is come up with a handful of alternative course layouts, which I’ll display somewhere public so that everyone can choose their favourite. Oh, and raise the umpteen million required for a multi-year contract. Anyone up for a spot of crowdfunding?

Keith Jones is a self-confessed car geek from Lincoln with over 30,000 car books, magazines and sales brochures being testament to that. Keith took his first steps in motoring writing launching his blog in 2011, contributing to Autocar, BBC 5 Live, CBS and MSN in the following months. In 2013, he gave up his teaching career to become a staff writer at Parkers.

By Keith Jones keithjones

Car enthusiasts are a curiously disparate bunch. Brought together under that euphemistic umbrella as though an appreciation of a typically four-wheeled, self-propelling machine meant we all liked the same thing. Often we don’t, and one aspect of car culture that’s more divisive than others is the modding scene.

When a new car’s launched, I’m comfortable in the belief that – the constraints imposed by safety legislators and marketers aside – it looks how its designer intended. Every line, swoop, crease, scallop, angle and detail agonised over for weeks on end, before the styling was signed off for production.

It’s for this reason I often struggle to accept a car’s mid-life facelift as an improvement over the original.

Usually the work of a different designer, working at a different moment in time, it’s a reinterpretation of someone else’s creation. No matter how talented the individuals involved, it smacks of Charles Dickens reworking the introduction and conclusion of Romeo and Juliet. Or worse, Dan Brown redrafting anything at all.

So attempting to comprehend the whole concept of car modification is one which passes me by with as much ease as logarithms did back in my GCSE Maths classes. After all, why take a perfectly good, well-engineered, usually fast car and systematically dismantle it? I resisted the urge to say spoil. Just.

The problem is I’ve inadvertently fallen into the trap of assuming all car mods are limited to a set of oversized wheels and a baked bean tin exhaust pipe, fitted to a ropey shed of a car with barely enough power to drive out of a wet paper bag.

I realise I’m in that prejudiced trap on occasions such as a few weeks ago when I spotted Lincoln-based electrician, Simon Lynn’s modded Honda Civic Type R.

Simon Lynn’s modded Civic Type R might have caught Keith’s eye, but he still couldn’t bring himself to own one.

It’s impossible not to notice the arresting Porsche Mint Green hue that Simon’s car’s been enveloped in, an ever-present reminder that he wanted something unique. It’s certainly that, and while taste’s an infinitely personal thing, I have to confess I’m quite taken with it. That was rather cathartic saying that in public.

Spending time in Simon’s company reveals a fascinating modding world in which he’s become deeply ensconced, revealing not only the breadth of talent required to become a successful modder, but also a desire to create something that nobody else will have.

Hearing the list of work Simon’s undertaken, including lowering the suspension, fitting wider wheels, rolling the arches (allowing those wider wheels to fit where the old ones did), adding induction and exhaust kits, installing a bodywork package and having it resprayed, you appreciate the lengths guys like him go to in order to keep the costs down.

The crux is this – here’s a car that’s unique, and yet so far he’s spent less than £6,000 in total, sourcing components himself and wherever he could, undertaking the mods too. How many spend over ten times that amount on a car and end up with something barely distinguishable from the next luxo-barge to come along?

Sure, you can spend more, as Simon confirmed he intended to: “Turbocharging the engine will more than double the power output but retrimming the interior might have to wait – my wife, Hayley, uses the car as her daily driver for our two kids, so ripping out all the seats isn’t an option right now,” he laments.

Hearing just how far mods can go adds new phrases to even my automotive-rich lexicon. A shaved bay involves moving or hiding all pipework and ducting under the bonnet, not a trip to the beautician, apparently.

Hearing of one man’s personal drive was genuinely eye-opening. Has it made me consider undertaking a similar project? No, it’s not fundamentally shaken my personal take on car design. But this previously unchartered water in the sea of car enthusiasm is now much more transparent and the enthusiasm and passion is evident.

Perhaps Simon and modders like him have the best of it – after all, they’re the ones driving something bespoke.

Keith Jones is a self-confessed car geek from Lincoln with over 30,000 car books, magazines and sales brochures being testament to that. Keith took his first steps in motoring writing launching his blog in 2011, contributing to Autocar, BBC 5 Live, CBS and MSN in the following months. In 2013, he gave up his teaching career to become a staff writer at Parkers.