Gumball 3000

So this happened today. The Gumball 3000 kicked off from London's showery Covent Garden. Alledgedly 120 (sorry, I didn't count) silly cars all ready for a massive adventure,

many

wearing

custom

vinyl

wraps.

As you can see, it was mainly the usual spread of exotica, luxury and SUV, but there were a few interesting things that caught my eye:

This little thing was an electric city car designed to, obviously, look like a Hummer. Now, I wouldn't want one personally, but it does go to show that plastic city cars don't have to look quite as shit as a G-wiz.

Really liked this New Beetle riding on Fuchs reps
How cool are they?!

Rocking a similar vibe was this 911
...with a nice bit of staggered offset lending some dish to the rears.

This GT500 Eleanor rep was pretty tidy, and the owner wasn't gentle with it either, which was nice to see. Needs a locker in it though, check the video!

This belonged to The Dudesons - I've just looked them up and they seem to be a bit of a Jackass/Dirty Sanchez ripoff. Good look though!

Talking of Dirty Sanchez, guess who this T4 belongs to?

Seemingly there for a bit of unrelated showing off was this gorgeous Mosler, mmm...

Also on display, along with a couple of Teslas, an electric Radical, and (bizarrely) a Peel microcar, was the Peugeot EX-1 concept car.

Carbon fibre wheels and inverted disc/calipers! Cool.

...and the cockpit is typically PSA-concept mental too (for those that haven't seen it before, the seat is integrated with the door, so you open the door, sit down, then shut yourself in, just like Captain Scarlet's SPV!

So, car of the day for me? Well, like a lot of 'real' car people (as in people that were there for the cars, not the bling or 'celebrities'...) it's got to be the Renault 4 v6. Renault 4 + Clio v6 underpinnings = ultra cool:

For more info and some build pics, check out this post on SSBB

Unfortunately, the decision to go was last minute (I even, stupidly, left without a coat!) so I had no time to charge the camera - hence the mobile phone cam photos, and the shoddy quality of this video montage of the best bits of the start from my perspective:

Kudos to the drivers of the F-150 and the Mustang for proper burnouts! A few others tried, including one Ferrari that ended up with clutch smoke pouring out of the vents, oops! The Marshall standing next to us (the one you can hear asking us about the chrome-wrapped Escalade) was a treasure trove of quotable material; "Is that the engines, that make the vroom vroom noise? And you like that noise?" being the choice cut.



All in all, a decent few hours distraction from revision! Now, back to the books...