Like a lot of people my age, I got into cars and modifying them by thumbing through my older brother’s copies of Max Power and Redline magazine and then making these wild wish lists in the Demon Tweaks catalogue. Back then, it was all about E36 M3 cabriolets with wide arch body kits and TV screens in the headrests and French hatchbacks with wild bodykits and painted interiors with diamond-stitched, brightly coloured seats. Simpler times, some might say…
My dream car when I was 14 was a Ford Escort Cosworth, but having an older brother who could already drive, I leant a lot about the sheer cost of buying and insuring these kinds of cars and how completely unattainable that would be. So, instead, I planned out a dream car replica using a mk5 Ford Escort. I wanted to buy a cheap, small engined model and then buy a fibreglass Cosworth bodykit (yes, a terrible idea, I know!) Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you feel about these questionable plans, this car never came to fruition and I, to this day, have never owned a Ford Escort.
Instead, I started off with Rovers. A Rover Metro that was quickly followed by a Rover 216. By all standards, they were two awful cars, but they were my first cars, so ones I remember fondly. I didn’t actually get into modifying cars until my third car – a 2000 Land Rover Freelander 3-door. I really wanted to go all-out with this one and build a truly unstoppable off-roading weapon, but due to being an 18-year-old student still at college, I really didn’t have the funds or knowledge to do any of this so instead I went down the dodgy Chinese AV upgrade route. Remember, this was back in 2005 and in-car tech was still pretty basic and those single-DIN fold-out screens were still probably the coolest thing one could have in a car but they were also ruddy expensive. I ended up buying a fold-out screen and separate DVD player from China with a name I couldn’t pronounce for the 3 weeks it worked, it was great. But with the DVD being mounted under the driver’s seat, whenever anyone sat in the back they would kick the player and it very quickly stopped working.
Since that initial adventure into taking a perfectly good and working factory standard vehicle, I dabbled quite a bit in car modification from an early R53 Mini Cooper S with no rear seats, cheap and cheerful coilover suspension and some lightweight alloy wheels to a 5.0-litre V8 Mercedes CL500 with modified factory air-ride, a stainless exhaust system and Rotiform BLQ wheels and even though I no longer own a modified car, I do still follow a lot of people in the car community that do and I often find myself fantasising about going back to my roots and going to town on a nice Audi wagon or something similar.
So why do we do it?
Why do we think that even though car manufacturers literally spend millions of dollars on a simple car badge redesign, we know more than them and can make guaranteed improvements with an eBay account and a bit of PayPal credit? For me, it’s not about knowing more or thinking I can do better – I am fully aware of my own limitations when it comes to anything mechanical – but more about making something stand out a little bit from the crowd and putting my own mark on it. I’ve always loved car design and the stories that went along with it and I sometimes felt that maybe I could put my own little story into each car I owned to add to the character.
My CL500 was a prime example as the reason I bought it originally was because when I was around 11-12 years old I did a project on cars and cycled to my local Mercedes-Benz dealer in Ipswich where the incredibly helpful sales assistant handed me a pile of brochures for the current line-up that I was then going to hack up and glue to a big piece of paper and present on back at school. Among the pile of glossy brochures, there was one that stood out. A hardback book with this fabulous and luxurious 2-door coupe presented on the front cover. The C215 CL. I remember thinking just how special that car looked compared to the other cars like the CLK and the C-class and how one day I would own one. Fast-forward 10 years and I bought my very own and it felt just as special as the day I got given that brochure. Now I had the car, I wanted to make it my own. I loved the long bonnet and the huge double-hinged pillar less doors, but I always felt it sat a bit high and could do with some different wheels. I also thought that the sound of that beautiful 5.0-litre V8 just wasn’t as deep and loud as I would have liked from my first V8 car… So I got to work.
Trawling forums for inspiration and ideas. Exhaust and suspension were the easy bits. Due to the car’s adjustable hydro-pneumatic suspension, there were plenty of kits around that could take a few inches off of the ride height and have it sitting much better and there were also plenty of exhaust kits for the car out there. The wheels, however, were tougher to find. There weren’t many modified CLs out there – and the ones that were out there were either not done to my taste, AMG replicas, or a few in the US with wheels on that I could never stretch to financially. Fortunately for me, this was around the time Rotiform were making moves and taking the European modified market by storm and I was a big fan of what they were producing over some of the more traditional wheels out there. After a bit of man-maths and a very conveniently timed credit card approval letter, I bit the bullet and ordered a set of 19-inch BLQs and some Pirelli P-Zero tyres and the rest is history.
I went everywhere with that car – every German car show in the country, every local meet, and I even drove it to Italy and around the Nurburgring – and everywhere it went, it started a conversation. Since then, I’ve met so many great and wonderful people in the car scene, many I’m lucky enough to call life-long friends, and I feel that if I didn’t have that hobby, and that obsession with making little changes and altering those little bits of the car’s appearance, I wouldn’t have met so many incredible people. Whether you’re spending thousands of pounds on engine mods, air suspension, custom wheels and expensive paint, or simply creating a budget home-brewed car working with only the tools and knowledge you have, one thing the whole community shares is that passion. And that want to take to something seemingly ordinary and put their own personal stamp on it.
The automotive landscape is in a strange state of flux at the moment and I wouldn’t want to predict where it will be in 10 years time, but as long as there are people out there still buying older cars and tinkering about with them behind closed shed doors, my faith in cars will remain. I’m even excited to see what people start doing with EVs in the coming years.
For The Love of Modding
Like a lot of people my age, I got into cars and modifying them by thumbing through my older brother’s copies of Max Power and Redline magazine and then making these wild wish lists in the Demon Tweaks catalogue. Back then, it was all about E36 M3 cabriolets with wide arch body kits and TV screens in the headrests and French hatchbacks with wild bodykits and painted interiors with diamond-stitched, brightly coloured seats. Simpler times, some might say…
My dream car when I was 14 was a Ford Escort Cosworth, but having an older brother who could already drive, I leant a lot about the sheer cost of buying and insuring these kinds of cars and how completely unattainable that would be. So, instead, I planned out a dream car replica using a mk5 Ford Escort. I wanted to buy a cheap, small engined model and then buy a fibreglass Cosworth bodykit (yes, a terrible idea, I know!) Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you feel about these questionable plans, this car never came to fruition and I, to this day, have never owned a Ford Escort.
Instead, I started off with Rovers. A Rover Metro that was quickly followed by a Rover 216. By all standards, they were two awful cars, but they were my first cars, so ones I remember fondly. I didn’t actually get into modifying cars until my third car – a 2000 Land Rover Freelander 3-door. I really wanted to go all-out with this one and build a truly unstoppable off-roading weapon, but due to being an 18-year-old student still at college, I really didn’t have the funds or knowledge to do any of this so instead I went down the dodgy Chinese AV upgrade route. Remember, this was back in 2005 and in-car tech was still pretty basic and those single-DIN fold-out screens were still probably the coolest thing one could have in a car but they were also ruddy expensive. I ended up buying a fold-out screen and separate DVD player from China with a name I couldn’t pronounce for the 3 weeks it worked, it was great. But with the DVD being mounted under the driver’s seat, whenever anyone sat in the back they would kick the player and it very quickly stopped working.
Since that initial adventure into taking a perfectly good and working factory standard vehicle, I dabbled quite a bit in car modification from an early R53 Mini Cooper S with no rear seats, cheap and cheerful coilover suspension and some lightweight alloy wheels to a 5.0-litre V8 Mercedes CL500 with modified factory air-ride, a stainless exhaust system and Rotiform BLQ wheels and even though I no longer own a modified car, I do still follow a lot of people in the car community that do and I often find myself fantasising about going back to my roots and going to town on a nice Audi wagon or something similar.
So why do we do it?
Why do we think that even though car manufacturers literally spend millions of dollars on a simple car badge redesign, we know more than them and can make guaranteed improvements with an eBay account and a bit of PayPal credit? For me, it’s not about knowing more or thinking I can do better – I am fully aware of my own limitations when it comes to anything mechanical – but more about making something stand out a little bit from the crowd and putting my own mark on it. I’ve always loved car design and the stories that went along with it and I sometimes felt that maybe I could put my own little story into each car I owned to add to the character.
My CL500 was a prime example as the reason I bought it originally was because when I was around 11-12 years old I did a project on cars and cycled to my local Mercedes-Benz dealer in Ipswich where the incredibly helpful sales assistant handed me a pile of brochures for the current line-up that I was then going to hack up and glue to a big piece of paper and present on back at school. Among the pile of glossy brochures, there was one that stood out. A hardback book with this fabulous and luxurious 2-door coupe presented on the front cover. The C215 CL. I remember thinking just how special that car looked compared to the other cars like the CLK and the C-class and how one day I would own one. Fast-forward 10 years and I bought my very own and it felt just as special as the day I got given that brochure. Now I had the car, I wanted to make it my own. I loved the long bonnet and the huge double-hinged pillar less doors, but I always felt it sat a bit high and could do with some different wheels. I also thought that the sound of that beautiful 5.0-litre V8 just wasn’t as deep and loud as I would have liked from my first V8 car… So I got to work.
Trawling forums for inspiration and ideas. Exhaust and suspension were the easy bits. Due to the car’s adjustable hydro-pneumatic suspension, there were plenty of kits around that could take a few inches off of the ride height and have it sitting much better and there were also plenty of exhaust kits for the car out there. The wheels, however, were tougher to find. There weren’t many modified CLs out there – and the ones that were out there were either not done to my taste, AMG replicas, or a few in the US with wheels on that I could never stretch to financially. Fortunately for me, this was around the time Rotiform were making moves and taking the European modified market by storm and I was a big fan of what they were producing over some of the more traditional wheels out there. After a bit of man-maths and a very conveniently timed credit card approval letter, I bit the bullet and ordered a set of 19-inch BLQs and some Pirelli P-Zero tyres and the rest is history.
I went everywhere with that car – every German car show in the country, every local meet, and I even drove it to Italy and around the Nurburgring – and everywhere it went, it started a conversation. Since then, I’ve met so many great and wonderful people in the car scene, many I’m lucky enough to call life-long friends, and I feel that if I didn’t have that hobby, and that obsession with making little changes and altering those little bits of the car’s appearance, I wouldn’t have met so many incredible people. Whether you’re spending thousands of pounds on engine mods, air suspension, custom wheels and expensive paint, or simply creating a budget home-brewed car working with only the tools and knowledge you have, one thing the whole community shares is that passion. And that want to take to something seemingly ordinary and put their own personal stamp on it.
The automotive landscape is in a strange state of flux at the moment and I wouldn’t want to predict where it will be in 10 years time, but as long as there are people out there still buying older cars and tinkering about with them behind closed shed doors, my faith in cars will remain. I’m even excited to see what people start doing with EVs in the coming years.
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James Ford
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