UK Edition
I passed my driving test in 2001, when I was 17. This was not a milestone simply for the convenience and freedom, as it is for more and more young drivers today. It was a passport to a whole social world that I’d long been a frustrated spectator to through my earlier teen years – the modified car scene.
I loved cars fervently then, just as I do now. And while that love began thanks to my Dad’s rallying fetish and impeccable taste in Seventies and Eighties sports cars, my college social life revolved around a backdrop of Vauxhall Novas, Citroen Saxos and Ford Fiestas fitted with boom-box exhausts and unnecessarily inconvenient body kits.
That’s right ladies and gents, I was unashamedly a part of the ‘boy racer’ scene, and I’m proud of it. Moreover, even with the benefit of hindsight and being a proper grown up with a kid and all, I think the whole culture was a good thing.
Sure, there were some horrifically tasteless cars created, and some excellent cars ruined as a result of it. In 2008, I remember the agony of selling my wonderfully standard Peugeot 205 GTi to an 18 year old with plans to modify it. And even back then I had the good taste to favour cars that had performance mods as well as style.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not blind to the fact that it was (still is, in fact) very easy to hate the baseball-cap-and-oversized-spoiler image of the boy racers. But the whole movement was a powerfully creative thing, a social thing, and something that we did honestly and with genuine joy and engagement. It was certainly more wholesome than the smorgasbord of misdemeanours that teenagers could otherwise find themselves drawn to.
We weren’t reckless, we just liked cars and liked having fun with and around them. We spent more time stood around debating what variety of Subaru Impreza we’d buy (although I was always a Mitsubishi Evo girl, myself), and playing Colin McRae Rally on the PlayStation than we did driving anywhere.
As another aside, every one of my modded car crew became seriously handy drivers, because we cared about our driving. It was a real matter of pride that we could heel-and-toe smoothly, balance the car’s weight nicely, pick a good line through a corner…
And no, I never have owned an Impreza or an Evo (give it time), but I did own a Toyota Celica GT-Four (ST185), complete with boosted turbo pressure, adjustable dampers and an exhaust loud enough to set car alarms off. It scratched the Japanese performance car itch that I’ve always had and, of the many cars I’ve owned, it’s the one that I remember most fondly. Not least because it wasn’t standard, and therefore felt even more uniquely ‘mine’ than most of my other cars.
Today’s car culture seems so sterile by comparison, shaped by a culture of borrowing rather than ownership, crippling insurance costs, increasingly undesirable driving conditions and the uncertain yet inevitable autonomous future. The closest thing you get to a modified car today is stuff from Overfinch or similar; a vulgar “I’m richer than you” declaration in vehicular form, rather than a heartfelt ode to loving your car and making it your own.
I know that it can’t and won’t come back, but I can’t help wishing it would. It’s still a moment of piercing joy when I see a nicely modified car; more often than not a Scooby or the like. After all, they may be few and far between but the modified car fellowship does still exist – mostly in murky corners of Wales and the Fens. And, blimey, can they drive.
So, you heard it here first. The boy and girl racers were a good thing. Good for cars, and good for young people.
Whatever happened to the boy (and girl) racers? We need them now more than ever