I can't believe I haven't updated this for so long!! 15 months is pretty bad form really. Everything here is all good and well. The beat now has a girlfriend called Carol (1993 Autozam Carol!), and I've been keeping things up to date on my Minkara page instead. Here's the link, as of now I'll probably just keep posting over there and leave this as a forwarding post. Thanks a lot for reading this blog! Mike
Oh blimey. 2 months without any posts - thats not good! We've been busy moving house and a bit frantic with work recently. I'll update with some proper posts soon, but for now here's the obligatory snow picture! Best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a great start to the new year! Mike and Katie Ho Ho Ho.
20th September was the annual Kei Kars in the Park meet at Kingsbury Water Park - the turn out was really good this year with plenty beats, cappos, a lovely avanzato and best of all, all 3 of the known AZ-1's on the road in the UK. People travelled from as far as Scotland and Cornwall to come and eat icecream and drink expensive cups of tea from the cafe. It was a lovely day and Emily did a fantastic job of making it a great day for everyone who turned out. Best of all the Beat-club won a trophy for Best Presented Club - woo! Sadly our pics didnt come out too great but heres a few of em:
The South-Yorkshire mini-convoy met at services on the M1 - it was great to catch up with the Beardo-Family again:
Adam's awesome 'Best Decorated Kei-Car' winning cappo gave many smiles and admiring glances from amazed kids :D:
Good turn out this year:
A famous little beat won 'Best Presented Beat':
Here's its moment of stardom:
Fantastic Avanzato:
More cappos:
Always our fav cappo - looking lovely in the sun!:
There's some great pics on Beardo's site here (including our new fav pic of our car!), and Emilys KKITP album here - both are probably a lot better than ours!
Speaking of the teg, it was time for its annual service so we popped over to TDI North in Warrington to get it done and fit a couple of bits we had for it as well. Fortuntely all was well and no other work was needed. The Mugen manifold and cat went on, along with Goodridge hoses and a FEELS engine damper. More pics to come soon once the poor thing has had a clean! The biggest change we noticed was when the engine damper was fitted - the vibrations are felt much more in the cabin but the engine response and general feel under acceleration is really great. At first we were a bit unsure whether it would be ok for every day driving but we've quickly got used to it.
Towards the end of August a bunch of the KKITP regulars headed down to Curborough Sprint Course in the Midlands for a fun day out messing around in small cars. In amongst the scoobys, glanza's and other big fast cars were a couple of cappos, don's AZ-1 and Dave's beat. Sadly Mr Beat-chan wasnt back on the road at this point so we took the teg down and had a few leisurely laps of the course - easily setting the record for the slowest ever integra lap! :D The day was a lot of fun and certainly wetted our appetite to do it again... but definitely in the beat next time! Thanks to Emily, Tom and all the guys for a brilliant day out.
Waiting to go behind Don:
Onboard with dave:
Waiting patiently behind Andy and one of them scooby-things:
Right, big update time - first thing first, the little bugger is BACK! He went for the MOT on the thursday and went straight through without any advisories. Then it was back for a quick polish before we collected him. On friday we headed down to Hawleys here in shef to get a laser alignment done and the A048's fitted. The tyres have been fantastic and really transform the car (will be sad to go back to normal tyres once the weather turns!). We're over the moon to have the little chap back and have been having far too much fun driving around to remember to write blog updates! Thanks again to everyone who sent us messages and get well soon stuff for the car - and hugest thanks to John, Matt, Andy, Kaz and everyone else at the bodyshop for their incredible work and help. :) Here's some pics from the friday after some new tyres and a good wax:
