In my opinion car clubs are a great idea, they play host to both the relative
new comers to the car scene such as myself and the grizzled veterans who have
built up many projects, and as such are a great source of information on issues
specific to a certain platform or marque. I myself am a member of the MG ZR
owners club (www.mgzrownersclub.co.uk)
whose founders split away from a bigger and fairly venomous site and club (www.themgzr.co.uk).
Which raises my real issue with car club sites is that they can often become
quiet harsh and uninviting places due to members feeling that there is a set
way to style and modify that particular car, and if you style or modify it in
any other way you become chastised and open to abuse in extreme cases for
daring to style a vehicle you own in the way that you want (examples being
insane tyre stretch on the mk1 golf or small rims on the EK9 civic and smoothed
bodywork and insanely low suspension drops that are very popular in the 'euro'
tuning scene). By in large the friendliest site I have visited is the Mighty
car mods forum. www.mightycarmods.com)
which has a very large and diverse group of car owners and builds (although it
does have a very heavy 'jdm' influence)
Which brings me to the subject of styling of cars, something which should
be personal and done to your own tastes and not for the approval of someone
else or a 'scene' as it where, which leads to a "if your car isn't like
this then it doesn't look good" attitude. This makes people not want to do
things differently to the norm, and because of this you end up with a show
stand of cars that all look exactly the same. It seems as though it is an all-out
battle to see who can get their car the lowest, get the best tyre stretch or
fit the widest wheels with the highest negative offset as possible under the
car regardless of how this will affect the handling of the car. While this can
be nice to look at, and I have seen some "stanced" cars that I have
liked, but having sat behind cars styled like this on the motorway and seen the
sparks fly it’s not a styling movement I can get behind. This admittedly is a relatively
nice progression from the "fast and the furious" days of styling
where it was all huge chrome wheels and garish paint and body kits, but at
least these posed no danger to other road users. I put it to you simply that if
you do anything to a car purely to satisfy others and find approval from a
group of enthusiasts then you are doing it for the wrong reasons.
There is more that I want to write but I am unsure of how to put it into words,
and when I asked around a bit Mr sheep informed me of his tiny penis, like
seriously tiny and the ladies laughed at him for it.
