Newark Kit Car Show is always a show I try to get to but due to me moving to the south coast, I don’t like to drive my kit car that distance any more. This is because the buggy is not the most comfortable, and because I am getting a bit old to spend five hours in a car.
So this year I am heading up on my motorbike. I could have gone in my good ladies Suzuki Cappuccino but decided that the weather was nice, and I quite fancied trying to clock up some extra motorway miles on the bike.
I am the owner of our Kit Car club (MuddyBuggies) but I don’t organise the events and the club stands, and this is because I travel around the world a lot and am not in the UK for quite a few shows. Furthermore, I have some health issues so the pressure of organising gets left to someone else 🙂
We have a club stand at Newark, and normally we get sent a couple of free passes for support vehicle drivers but this year we had not received any, so I was hoping it was a glitch and there would be there when I asked for them.
Myself and another buggy kit car owner arrived for the show at around 10am, and as I expected I had to pay on the gate, and because I was camping I had to pay £20 to get into the show for the two days which was a little annoying, but I decided to go and see the organisers and see what was up.
A quick chat to a very unhelpful lady who was blunt rude and not really promoting the kit car industry. All she said was that things were tight and that why should I get free entry. I don’t know maybe because I have been supporting the show for 10 years and always push to get my club to the show….
It was not the best start for the day, but I decided to move on and let it go and figured that it was not going to change 🙂
A quick look around the show and it looked a lot smaller and there were not as many kit cars there and there was very few trade stands there as well so it was extremely clear that this show was slowing disappearing.
It’s a shame to see, but you can see why its vanishing slowly…
Newark does not promote to get families in and involved and there never seems to be enough of the footfall that you would expect and that can only be down to the pricing and that the average family who would like a day out you are looking at about £30 to get into the show and then another £30 on things like over priced food and drink.
The other thing that is getting frustrating is that it’s not even attracting kit car owners anymore. There were a lot of chavvy cars that were there, badly modified Vauxhall and Fords full of filler and also a fairly big selection of motorcycles, which annoyed me as my bike is quite an interesting bike, and I bet you they didn’t have to pay to get in… (am I sounding Bitter?)
Ok so let’s get back to the Kit Car part of the Newartk Show.
On the Saturday, the weather was a bit up and down, and we did get wet a few times but not much as we would just dive into one of the halls and walk about a little more.
There was quite an interesting car to the entrance to the main hall, and it turns out it was electric, and it was made up of a lot household items like guttering from a roof and dustbin lid to make up the nose but more interestingly it was an electric vehicle, and the chap was managing to get around 120 miles on a single charge which did get us thinking.
How can companies all over the worked be throwing money at electric transport, and they are only getting results similar to this chap and a guy in his garage has been able to build a car that ticks all the boxes of an electric vehicle, and he has not finished it yet?
In the main hall of the kit car show there were the usual kit cars, and as always, I love walking around the Ferrari replica stand and looking at how bad they look and laughing at the owners of these vehicles and wondering why they would try to replicate a £200,000 sports car on only a £25K budget… More to the point. Why has Ferrari let these companies exist surely it is ruining a brand? Maybe this discussion is for another article one day?
So at about 14:00 we decided it was time to get some food, and I decided to go for the healthy option, and I decided to go for a Jacket potato with cheese and beans. Where as a friend went for the same, but he had just cheese, and he also wanted a drink but refused to pay £1.80 for a small bottle of Fanta.
The Potatoes were horrific tiny, and a majority of Simons was black and mine was not a great deal better, but for some reason, I pushed on and ate it…. this is something I was going to regret later.
About 6 hours passed and we are all sat around the club stand, and I start to feel unwell and decide it’s probably best I head to the toilets and as I expected it was brown rain for me.
I spent most of the night walking and sometimes running back to the toilets, and this was not particularly enjoyable. I was now thinking about heading to a hotel but doubted my chances of finding somewhere at that time of the night.
It was about 1am that I finally managed to get some sleep, and I didn’t sleep too well. The following day I decided to get up and head straight home as I was feeling very bad and did not want to stay any longer.
So as you can imagine I did not enjoy Newark Kit Car Show this year. Starting off with having to pay to get into then be served with overpriced food, which potentially ruined the rest of the weekend.
I now have to make the decision, whether Newark Kit Car Show is a show that I will be supporting in the future as it is about a 5-hour drive for me, which also includes a stop over and then camping along with lots of petrol and what not it is quite an expensive weekend coupled by the fact it’s not a great kit car show at the best of times.
As you can tell I am a little unhappy, and I hope that Newark actually gets a grip for next year and surprises us all, but as it stands the UK needs to get another great kit car show as we are down to just Stoneleigh at the moment, and I really want to go to a few more throughout the year.
If you have any questions or comments then, please leave and ask them below.