Several responses to my post on the fallout following the modified car meeting, none of them very happy with my comments. One of them, was a well balanced and passionate plea for a better understanding of those who genuinely enjoy modifying their cars.
Another took the time to criticise my poor grammar, but offered little else. The third one suggested that I should have, or is it of?, been criticising the police for allowing the meeting to go ahead.
Having stirred up these enthusiasts, I suppose I should at least apologise for some of my more sweeping statements and also for classifying them all universally as boy and girl racers. However, I hope they will in turn accept that they were bound to stir up a s**t storm of protest by doing what they did in the first place – taking over a town centre car park without any form of permission.
I was going to suggest that if this had been a rally for mobility scooter enthusiasts, the response would have been very different. However, thinking about the bad behaviour of many of these people on our streets and footpaths, I’m not so sure. So let’s use mothers showing off their baby buggies as the example. Whilst the owners of the car park may have been slightly miffed at the uninvited takeover, the general public would probably have responded by saying, what’s the harm?
Unfortunately for the modified car enthusiasts, they come with a significant amount of baggage when it comes to public perception. Not least the belief of non-enthusiasts, such as myself, that they are all boy and girl racers at heart. Right or wrong, the simple act of congregating in a town centre location, to display the most obvious badge of the boy and girl racer fraternity – the soup-up motor car – was always going to create a negative response from the general population.
Can I therefore suggest that in future, if modified car enthusiasts don’t want to be pilloried in the local press again and see all the good stuff they do for charity ignored, they don’t takeover town centre car parks without notice. Also, if the local press is to be believed, it would also appear that a lot of litter was left behind, a particular bug-bear of mine and something that definitely winds me up.
It would also be nice if they could convince the less socially responsible boy and girl racer element of the modified car enthusiast brigade, to stop peeing off the rest of us!
Roger Gambba-Jones 
Why not turn it to the advantage of the town and making it an authorised event. At this very moment dozens of scooters are going past my window on the A46 towards an official meet in Cleethorpes. Purge the negativity – after all the Flower Parade brings its fair share of trouble but it gets general support. Perhaps you could get Halfords to sponsor the event?
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Andrew, this is a good idea in principle except that many of those who have responded seem to see nothing wrong in what they did i.e. invading a car park without any form of permission, nor in the behaviour of the boy and girl racer fraternity that led me to rant about them in the first place. I’m more than happy to take criticism, but I have trashed one comment that simply sought to slag off my age group and suggest that we must of done things wrong when we were young, so what’s wrong with them doing the same?
Is it likely that if we invited the organisers of this meeting to make it a legitimate activity, they would come on board? Or is the under the radar, technically illegal insider nature of this event a major part of its attraction and something that would be lost by coming out ot the shadows.
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Can you actually invade a car park? Im far from excusing the typical behaviour of the average boy racer, but some people do go to these meets, just have a chin wag. As with all gatherings of any group you do get the few bad apples who will cause the rest to be looked at in a bad light. In my own experience, I find going to the odd car meet far less anti-social than a town center at kick out time. As for the age of the attending indviduals, when it concerns members of my club (Skyline owners club), at 27 im one of the younger ones with many being in their 30s, 40s and 50s. No-one should automatically assume that because some people have parked and are having a chat in a car park that they are up to no good. Unfortunately every meet is going to be different so would have to be scrutinised individually to be fair to those like me that just want to drive their pride and joy and have a heated debate about the price petrol with a few friends .
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