Well, it's been a long time coming but the countdown has begun. At the end of the month I'm off through France, Belgium and Germany to The Nurburgring to do a few laps of the infamous track/road - but more importantly for a decent road trip. Euro tunnel have been bought, so there's just a few finishing touches before I'm set. Of course I'm taking my spanking new RenaultSport Clio 200 which should be a hoot, albeit at the risk of financially wrecking myself if I wack it at any point. Anyway, I'm not going to beat lap records, just have a good time with some friends. A couple of things I'm still debating it whether to take spare brake pads, but I'm assuming as my car has only done 5000 miles, there is plenty of meat left on them, I guess it's just being prepared if I cook them at all as it's a pretty high speed bit of road (not to mention the trip there!) I had batter collect some music together on my iPod!! ...

Well, a couple of weeks on and the Clio is still wokring. The engine has been run in for the minimum duration of 600 miles (below 3500 rpm) and now it's a free-for-all. It's been like wearing a chastity belt for the last couple of weeks, you only see what the car can do when you rev the nuts off it. Overall I'm still very impressed with the car. It's had a decent wash with the help of my friend Tim which can only get more geeky as the weather picks up. My only slight dissapointment has been the gear ratios, which resemble something you would normally see in a garden lawn mower! Seriously high gearing means it's near 4000rpm at 80mpg, which feels a touch high to me after my Alpina cruised around at under 3000 at that speed. Still, the first country road/bend that comes along wipes all those worries away and put a wacking great big smile on my face again - it's truely a hoot to drive, which is why I went for it in the first place. It's now done nearly 700 miles and the MPG is pretty shocking for a NA 2.0...

You know, years have passed and I never knew it had gone. Sure, I used to enjoy the drive to work, especially down an empty country lane where I can use some driving skill. Today though, reminded me what I had been missing when my RS 200 Clio arrived. I'm still breaking in the engine, only 70 miles covered so far out of the 600 minimum - I might take it to 1000 miles before giving it the "redline experience" I've heard so much about. So anyway, I went off to work as soon as it arrived and everything was a bit weird. You know, when you can't find the windscreen wipers, or turn the stereo up without using the knob on the dashboard etc. Within minutes I found the cruise control and had tuned and set Radio One on the radio.. all was going well. Only when I reached Hungerford did I realise that even though I was crawling about in this tin-can-with-spoilers of a car, it felt superb! The drive home was also fun, but with the clock ticking I had to pick my son up from school as Claire has Measles!? So I got home, did some work until the clock ticked past 5pm, where it was time to 'tinker' with some of the optional extras I bought with the car, such as Bluetooth, Monitor pack and iPod connectivity....

.. with excitement I should say! If you're a fried on facebook you 'may' have heard already, but I'm hoping to be getting my first new car in the next week or so. After getting the three year itch with the Alpina B3S I decided enough being sensible, now it was time to get soemthing fun and fruity to enjoy. A fun and sensible car for a man in his 30's with a child.. hmm, a Ford Focus.. a BMW something-or-other? Oh no.. a RenaultSport Clio 200! Oh yes, none of this family car rubbish, I've gone for a little hatchback which has a 2L engine, no turbo and the best bar-none chassis on sale right now. All this adds up to a high hoot-per-minute count, that can only be parred by something along the lines of a Lotus Elise, yet that only has two seats! Of course, being *cough* more mature than many who buy this type of car, I have to splash out on a few extras to make it useable as an every day car. With that in mind I went for the 'FF' version (Full Fat), rather than the stripped...

Well, what to write, huh? My first entry into a blog which I'm hoping will at times be interesting, at times be dull.. and hopefully a few times where it's a bit thin on the ground! I've been buying some music recently and it's been a long time coming from listening to 1980-90-00's guff for the last couple of years as 'that's all I had'. Part of this inspiration is due to my new car having an iPod connection. I have an iPod, but I can't really say I've used it a great deal in the last few years due to either being in a car (without socket), jogging (there the iPod 4g isn't suitable) or at home, where I've been streaming music from my little network storage box, or playing the original CD via the Ps3. So, the Ps3 died... flashing-red-light-of-death, which is the Ps3 version of the red-ring-of-death that Xbox 360's suffer from. Being a man, I'm holding on to it in the hope it'll fix itsellf while collecting dust. Sony must be kidding when they said the Ps3 technology was 'good for 10 years', it's been 2-3 years and it's dead. No matter how 'good' the technology is, it's frigin' useless if it dies before it's obsolete!...