A New Dawn

 So the long, drawn out decision of whether to keep Barry or my kit car, Zedster, has been decided - Zedster has been sold and I pray I haven't made the wrong decision.

Nothing too exciting recently but the weather has been pretty good, so several little runs out. Today was a bit more, a 65 mile route with a kit car group I use to occasionally run out with. Their 7am start is normally to early for me (takes me 45 minutes to get to the start point) but my FB group were going to Brooklands for another Porsche day which I wasn't keen on (I'm booked to go to the German day in September).

The run with 5 kit cars was great fun - I kept apologising for not having my kit any more but they seemed fine with it and we had a good run; nice weather, little traffic at that time (which is why they start so early) and breakfast at the Chalet:

Very busy, as always, at the Chalet - loads of bikes and an MX5 group turned up - this chopped down version was pretty funky:

Barry performed well - no problem keeping up. In fact, some of the speeds were more than I normally went in Zedster and the road surfaces would have had me gritting my teeth, so a good result for my ongoing guilt about selling him.

In other news, my son has sold his M2 (just too uncomfortable for daily use) and got a rather glorious Mustang:

Being about the size of Essex, I might be able to beat him on country road runs now...

Simply Porsche, Beaulieu

 Simply Porsche is an annual event held at Beaulieu motor museum (they do several of these for other marques over the year) and its the biggest single-make car show I've ever been to - something like 1,600 Porsches were there.

On a glorious, sunny day, I met up with about 15 others, at the Hogs Back cafe:

A slightly chaotic convoy followed for the hour long run down to Beaulieu, as we all tried to keep together. So many Porsches, that we had to queue for 20 minutesto get in, snaking round a dusty car park:

We had a prime spot in the center of the action:

If you wanted to buy a Porsche, this was the place to come to see all the possible variations and colours:

The museum is also great, with some superb exhibits:

...and several of the Top Gear vehicles:

A wonderful day out in the hot sun, enjoyable chats with the Porksters group and an awesome drive home - I've found a 20 minute section of twisty, country roads which are mostly empty and has recently been re-surfaced. While 'enjoying' this route home, a McLaren F1 and Noble (M600?) flew past in the opposite direction - excellent.

To be honest, I would have preferred a more generic car show; 1600 cars which are most well known for not having changed design much in the last 60 years does not make for the most varied of exhibits. I actually spent more time in the museum...but it was still a great day out.

Oily at last

 Finally got round to doing something vaguely mechanical; an oil change. The last one was only done 4k miles ago but it was 2 years ago and I've overfilled it since with the useless lift cleaner additive, to try cure the tick at idle.

I may have struck gold by getting in touch with a guy from the Boxa forum who lives 20 minutes from me and has a lift and enough tools to run a decent garage business, if he wanted. Using his lift to do the oil change made the job even easier than it is anyway.

Hopefully, if I never to anything more major, I can use his lift again.

Most amazing, the oil change seems to have cured the tick at idle - see if it comes back but really nice to not have that ticking away at the lights.

Also, I bought a new fuel cap as the tether broke on the old one.

Simply Porsche event at Beaulieu tomorrow - in preparation, cleaned Barry to within an inch of his life (well, to my low standard) and he does look great; one big advantage of the silver colour.