This week's day out

At the kind invite of Mitsubishi Motors, today I took a trip to the Autosport International Show at Birmingham's NEC to meet with Russ. He'd been sent the tickets so he could see his next car for the first time in the flesh.

On the stand, seemingly the largest of any main-stream manufacturer, were two Lancer Evolution X cars. One was a bit of a dodgy orange-red affair ("it looks fantastic in the daylight", hmmm, I wonder) while the other was a very nice looking metallic black. The former was a GSR SST FQ-300 "flappy paddle" gearbox version and the latter was a GSR FQ-300 manual. Those of you who know Russ will not be surprised to learn he's planning to go for the GSR FQ-360 (the number signifies the horse power) and he was delighted to learn he's somewhere near the top of the list of 52 deposit payers.

For completeness, we had a good look around the car an established the boot has been replaced with a sub-woofer and somewhere to put your golf shoes (any clubs will need to go in the cabin). All in all we were both very impressed.

Elsewhere in the show we had to endure various trials, avoiding the gaze of the promotion girls with their sprayed-on micro-shorts - we found the best way was simply to stay behind them(!). The engineering section was fun too with all the CAD-CCM mills and weird bodypart scanning robots. An F1 clutch assembly was impressively small. And the German (we assume) robot controlled shelving was a sight to behold. We were a little puzzled by SiliconHoses.com, "the new name in silicon hoses" - what on Earth was the old name?!??!?

The journeying to/from the venue was particularly wet and not much fun. Still a good day out. I was intending to visit with Tom tomorrow but he's not so fussed so we'll give it a miss, "it's not the Motor Show after all" he says. I dare say we might look to make the trip next year.