It's your last chance to enter this year's Ormskirk MotorFest

THE organisers of this year's Ormskirk MotorFest have hit their target of bringing 350 classic cars and bikes to West Lancashire next month - but that means you'll have to hurry if you want to enter your pride and joy.

Aintree Circuit Club said it had reached its goal for the 30 August event, and will be closing entries tomorrow (25 July). It's free to take part, although entering the event's new Concours D'Elegance contest is £10 per vehicle.

Club chairman Mike Ashcroft said:"We will shortly be closing for Entries as we have now reached 350 vehicles, which is our target for this year.

"Late entries from racing type machinery may be accepted and also for the Concours d’Elegance, which you can enter online too."

Previous entries at the MotorFest, which has taken place in Ormskirk town centre since 2011, have included a BRM P261 Formula One car, a Ferrari Enzo originally owned by Rod Stewart, and the McLaren MP4-12C. The event includes displays in the town centre and Coronation Park, plus parades on the town's one-way system.

If you want to enter go to the event website and fill in the online form with your vehicle details.

Forget the silly name - the Nissan Qashqai is a deserving cash cow

THE Nissan Qashqai is a bit like the geeky kid everyone seems to have gone to school with. Studious and destined to go on to greater things, but entirely fair game for the playground bullies because some cruel parents have given it a stupid name.

I’ve just spent a couple of days in the company of the latest 1.5 DCI model and almost felt compelled to leap to its defence because people couldn’t resist calling it names. Sticks and stones – apt, given its off-roader pretensions – may break its parts but words will never hurt it.

“Ahhh, so you’ve got a Nissan Squashed Quiche! Any good?” a mate of mine immediately asked when he found I’d got the nation’s fifth best-selling new car as a temporary companion.

I replied by telling him that yes, I can understand entirely why so many of you are buying them. It’s roomy, easy to manoeuvre for something of its off-roader stature, and it’s well equipped. In fact, easily my favourite thing about the latest model is the optional Blind Spot Warning system, which flickers a tiny little orange lightbulb next to your door mirror every time an errant Transit thunders past. It’s got the potential to save your life on a congested motorway, but it doesn’t beep intrusively every ten seconds. Just that little orange flicker to remind you. Why can’t all cars have one?

Another pal wasn’t surprised when I told him. “They’re great, those Cash Cows. Loads of people I know have got ‘em”.

Agreed. Not only is usefully more practical than Nissan’s family hatch for the same sort of money, the Pulsar, it’s got a chunky, rugged look to it the more conventional Golf rival doesn’t. Like the first generation Cash ‘n’ Carry – sorry, Qashqai – it’s also built in Britain so you can justifiably buy one as a patriotic purchase, and unlike the first generation model it doesn’t suffer from having slightly cheap-feeling plastics throughout its interior.

It was my dad, however, who posed the big question. “It looks like a good car, the Mushy Peas,” he said. “But would you buy one?”

Personally, I wouldn’t – but that’s because the Skoda Yeti I tried a few weeks ago could endure trickier terrain and carry bigger bookcases than the Crash Bandicoot can, and I know the Nissan makes up for it with better looks and a nicer drive.

The great thing with this bit of the market is that everyone makes a small, off-roader-esque car these days – but the Nissan’s one of the best because it’s such a good all-rounder. That’s why it’s such a big seller – and why it really is a Cash Cow.

Get your entries in for the 2015 Ormskirk MotorFest!

CLASSIC CAR owners have until the end of the month to get their entries in for this year’s Ormskirk MotorFest.

This year’s event takes place on Sunday, August 30 and includes a new Concours D’Elegance competition which rewards owners for cleanly presented cars. The MotorFest takes place in Ormskirk town centre and Coronation Park.

For more information and to get your classic car entered go to the event's website.

Transatlantic 175 set the template for Liverpool car shows

AT LAST. After what feels like an eternity, Liverpool’s had a proper car show we could all enjoy!

I know that Transatlantic 175 – as a celebration of Merseyside’s maritime, rather than motoring, heritage – encompassed a weekend of events focusing on lots of things other than old cars. If you’d wandered down to the waterfront over the weekend, you’d have been greeted with music, vintage fashion and – rather more impressively – the imposing sight of the Queen Mary 2 looming over Liverpool’s waterfront.

But for me (and it seems, a couple of thousand others) the real highlight was seeing 200-odd cars, ranging from Austin Sevens to Aston Martin DB5s, dotted around in front of the Three Graces. Not only was it a wonderful sight to behold, but something long overdue.

For years, it’s been accepted wisdom that car shows are seas of Sunbeam Rapiers and folding chairs held in the grounds of stately homes and on village greens. Events like the ones at Tatton Park, Cholmondeley and – on a smaller scale, last weekend’s Lydiate show – are great are pulling in some very diverse old cars and the band of merry enthusiasts who support them (I should know – I’m one of them).

But big car events held in town and city centres have a different pull altogether – the power to draw huge throngs of car nuts onto the high streets. It’s the sort of thing that’d make Mary Portas don a set of driving goggles and hop into a vintage Bentley – thousands of people who love cars going to look at Astons and Ferraris, and then spending their hard-earned cash in the nearby shops afterwards.

The Manchester Classic Car Show, now in its third year, brings more than 9000 car nuts within a stone’s throw of the Trafford Centre. Bradford’s annual event – held in front of its Grade I-listed city hall – is a bustling event now in its tenth year. That’s before I get to the Regent Street Motor Show and how it conveniently gets thousands of shoppers onto the London thoroughfare just before Christmas. There was only one question I heard all the classic car owners asking at the Pier Head over the weekend. When’s it all happening again?

Transatlantic 175 set a template for something the powers-that-be should have done ages ago. Liverpool is a wonderful venue with a lot of car-making heritage – let’s have more of this sort of thing!

For more pictures from Transatlantic 175 see the 8 July 2015 issue of Classic Car Weekly

The Skoda Yeti - brilliant and fast when you least expect it

THE Skoda Yeti was the fastest thing on wheels when last weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed drew to a close.

It was a weird moment of motoring brilliance but it really happened – a car I’ve long championed as being the best all-rounder you can buy in the real world was faster than a Ferrari California, a Porsche 911 Turbo and a BMW M3 CSL to name but three. Largely because they were stuck in Britain’s longest snake of pre-event traffic and we weren’t.

All three of these supercars – and, to be fair, all the Astras and Accords they were sandwiched into the jam alongside – weren’t able to take advantage of the rutted byway we’d found snaking across the fields in a completely different way out of the nation’s biggest motoring event.

While it was a road in the loosest terms, it had the sort of frightening inclines, pointy rocks and deep ruts that’d give Land Rover owners second thoughts. But I’ve long maintained the Yeti is a shrunken Discovery, and sure enough it was skirting its way around every obstacle, leaving the miles of traffic behind. Mr 911 Turbo, I imagine, is still stuck in that jam now!

So the Yeti – with its short overhangs and slab sides – is a far better off-roader than it has any right to be. Yet it’s also the same car that managed to convey an obscenely long bookcase the previous weekend, and the same set of wheels that whisked me across the breadth of the country comfortably and quietly along the motorways.

Don’t get me wrong - it isn’t perfect. The air con controls are mounted so close to the gearlever that you’re confronted by an Arctic gust every time you go for third, and there’s a mysterious button on the centre console marked ‘TIM’ which failed to summon Messrs Henman, Dalton or Mallett whenever I pressed it.

It’s also not quite as sharp to drive as the Golf it’s based on, but if anything that’s a backhanded compliment. The Volkswagen Golf is Europe’s best-selling car and its party trick has been to spawn all sorts of other cars using roughly the same ingredients, which is why the Audi A3, the Volkswagen Scirocco and the SEAT Leon all feel a bit familiar. But I reckon the Yeti – by making a Golf so rugged and roomy and yet still feel Golfesque to drive – is by far the best of the bunch.

Yes, on paper the quickest Golf of them all is the 300bhp Golf R. But give me a rutted track, a bookcase and a traffic jam to deal with and I know which I’d bet on.