TRABIS GO FROM INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE TO THE SPACE RACE

Eastern Bloc classic car fans met in Staffordshire at the end of June for the Wartburg Trabant IFA Club’s first event since lockdown. The club is a home for all eastern bloc classics, and its 250 members have vehicles covering a remarkable 41 makes. Among the stars on this event were a Yugo 513, Barkas B1000 van, Ladas, Wartburgs, Trabants and the biggest crowd-pleaser of them all – a Zaporozhets 968M, the air- cooled rear- engined V4 car that was the USSR’s ‘people’s car’ and is one of only two 968Ms on the road in the UK.

Based in Keele, on the Saturday a convoy of 15 cars made a journey around Stoke-on-Trent taking in the post-industrial landscape, canal and Gladstone Pottery Museum with its iconic bottle- ovens, before concluding outside the spectacular 1850-built Jacobian Revival style Grade II listed Keele Hall. In stark contrast, Sunday saw the group head through leafy Staffordshire’s narrow lanes for various photo-stops (including a ‘splash down’ through a ford) before leaving the industrial revolution for Jodrell Bank’s contribution to the space age with its iconic radio telescope.

Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Lovell radio telescope was the world's largest steerable dish radio telescope when built in 1957, just in time for it to track the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 – the world’s first satellite – at the height of the Cold War. Then, the thought of Russian vehicles at Jodrell Bank would have been impossible. In January 1966 Jodrell Bank again hit the headlines when it recorded signals from the USSR space probe Lunar 9, the first to land on the Moon, that when played back through a borrowed telefax machine produced the world’s first picture of the moon’s surface. The picture was immediately put on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, scooping the Russians who hadn’t even revealed the purpose of its mission. This was three years before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Says club Chairman Mel Holley: 'The club is renowned for its friendliness and warm welcome, and we’d be delighted to see anyone with an interest (and of course their vehicles, if they have them) at future events.' There is no charge to attend club events other than venue admission fees. Full details and joining instructions are on the website at