Phil Farrell
Free at last! Well, sort of. This month marked the first proper road trip of the year for the GTS and I and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The usual crowd had booked into the Scramble at Bicester Heritage last year, and having then been postponed a couple of times it finally went ahead albeit in a slightly pared-back format due to the ongoing restrictions. For those not in the UK, the Bicester Heritage site is a former World War II RAF airfield that has been broadly taken over by a whole host of car-related businesses. There’s everything from a classic car restoration school to an auction house. It’s well worth looking up.
With the Sunday Scramble event being somewhat confusingly on a Saturday for us we set off late afternoon on the Friday to beat the traffic and get some miles round our wheels. Being able to legitimately get on the open road and stretch the legs of the GTS felt really good. We had a mix across the ages with myself in the 991 GTS, Joe (@ joewilliams_uk) in his air ride 964 and Chuck in perhaps the most beautiful G series I’ve ever seen. Given Chuck lives around the corner from me it was in fact the first time I’d seen it. Chuck maintains the car in the most fastidious of manners and the car certainly reflects the care and attention bestowed upon it, and it looks resplendent in every way as can be seen from the rather special picture @993andy took. Maybe one day Chuck will let me have a little spin in it!?
The evening before was spent consuming beer and burgers when Lee, Paul and Andy joined us. It was great to be out chatting with petrolhead friends again, looking forward to the event the next day.
Bicester did not disappoint. We managed to somehow get great parking spaces in with the big boys, and while perhaps the GTS really wasn’t that special in the grander scheme of things, Joe’s 964 on its air suspension and the G series definitely garnered many an admiring glance from passers-by.
Hot off the back of the successful trip to Bicester the group are already planning a trip up North for early July, all being well. I wrote this time last year about the trip up to Northumberland and the Lakes, so I’m hoping the consensus ends up in a similar sort of area of the UK. It’s unfortunate that ongoing travel challenges make a continental road trip all but impossible, but at the same time if we were able to get over the Channel we probably wouldn’t think too hard about enjoying some of the scenery and roads we have on our doorstep. Plus, whatever we can do to put money back into our own tourist and hospitality industries can’t be a bad thing either.
As I write, my iphone has just reminded me (again) that I need to book the MOT in. Wish me luck and I shall report back with the result, and hopefully an update of the July road trip.