July 2007... Tarting up the bodywork!

Throughout 2006, intensive cleaning and 'detailing' of Saxo's became very popular within the Saxperience community - this was mainly due to the excellent advice and customer service offered by 'Polished Bliss'. I decided to casually jump in on this band wagon - I don't particularly have much spare time, but I like to pretend

All of the cool kids were importing Porter Cable 7424 orbital polishers, then buying 110v transformers to run these units, as no decent, reasonably priced orbital polishers were available from the UK....

June 2007... Quick Run on the Rollers!

Myself and Suie moved into our new house in August 2006 and since then, other than attending TRAX, my car has pretty much just been parked at the side of the house, whilst we've been focusing on decorating the house and buying/building furniture, etc. Fortunately my car is parked beneath a car-port, so its semi-protected from the weather.

A North West regional meet had been arranged at Mikeanics - Congleton. As my Saxo hadn't been out in a while I decided to head to the meet to give the car a run and also meet some of the...

September 2006... Drive Silverstone!

The TRAX show at Silverstone was going to be the last event of the year for my VTS. A fair amount of organisation was put into the event this year and for the first time ever, Saxperience had booked a track session on the infamous Silverstone circuit!

The car had already taken quite a lot of track abuse earlier in the year and I was happy it had survived long enough to let me experience this circuit! The session was not long enough to really learn the correct lines, etc so the drive wasn't as quick as maybe it should have been....

July 2006... Back to Bruntingthorpe

With the car ready for the track, myself and Graeme headed back to Leicestershire for the FCS hospitality day at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground. It turned out to be a really great day with a huge variety of different cars out on track... Porches, Skylines, Caterhams, Merc's, Saxos, AX's, Clios, to name but a few.

I had borrowed Ant's rally-spec camera mount, so we were fortunate enough to get plenty of in-car video footage of our antics! (check out the Premium Member video section.)

It was good to catch up with a few...

June 2006... Time for bigger stoppers!

I had great fun in the car whilst out on track, but the brakes having been upgraded to Peugeot 306 GTi-6 discs, were still not upto the job! Very quickly whilst blatting around the track at speed, brake fade would creep in, meaning that I'd have to ease off the go-pedal!

After a quick chat to Garreth at G.S Motorsport, I ordered some stoppers that shouldn't suffer brake fade... in fact I was more worried about the car over-braking! After waiting for a week or two my new brakes arrived... a pair of Hi-Spec 325mm 2-piece discs...

May 2006... Shafted, yet again!

Myself and a group of Saxperience members arrived at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground for our 3 hour track action. The session was being run as an open pit session, so we could go on and off the track as many times as we liked during the 3 hours.

Every time I went out on track I took a different passenger with me... as everyone was keen to have a ride in the car! The weather had been a bit hit and miss all day, sometimes the sun would be out and other times it would be raining.

The last session of the day was just after...

April 2006... Gearing up for Bruntingthorpe!

The French Car Show was getting better and better as each year passed and this year a trackday had been arranged for the day prior to the show event. Saxperience booked half of the day's session at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground. All I had to do now was get the car ready for some track action!

The ICE was ripped out of the rear of the car and stored in the shed; it wasn't likely that it would ever make it back into the car, but it would make a good install for someone else one day!

With the boot stripped...

February 2006... Another year begins.

I didn't get upto much with the car over winter. It was too wet and cold to be motivated enough to work on it and with the salty roads everywhere, even cleaning it seemed like a waste of time. But soon enough, winter had passed and spring was on the doorstep!

One morning I moved the car in the driveway to find a little pile of oily grease on the tarmac. A quick check under the car confirmed that the drivers side driveshaft CV boot had failed! This was more than likely due to the rubber gaitor twisting earlier the previous year,...

October 2005... The end of an era?

Winter is drawing in and the show season is in hibernation. I started to think whether or not I wanted to continue to modify the Saxo, or whether it was time to archive all of my memories and move on? After thinking long and hard, I decided that I'd invested too much time and effort into modifying my Saxo to call it a day. I realised however that sometimes I wasn't able to enjoy the car as much as I should. After all this was my daily driver and if it broke it caused me a hassle getting to work and back with no car.

So, the decision...

May 2005... Time for a facelift

With the winter months well and truly gone and the long summer evenings on the way in, it's time again to start modifying in preparation for the season, which lies ahead. I often think that the front of my car looks a little strange... sometimes I dont like the full-face intercooler look?

In an attempt to try something fresh, I bought a pair of Ultra Angel Eye headlamps from G.S Motorsport. These are actually quite a good bit of kit and are supplied with ample fitting instructions. The light units themselves seem like very good quality....