It’s me, Mark Stone, and in this episode of the Backseat Driver Podcast, I sit down with Chris Rhodes to explore a life shaped by deep-rooted automotive heritage.

Chris shares stories of growing up surrounded by cars, influenced by his father’s Lotus service dealership and a household where motorsport and dealership life were part of everyday conversation. We talk about his early experiences with rallying, his love of Porsches, and even the unexpected charm of cars like the Fiat Panda.

I also explore Chris’s concept of the “pirate run”, a relaxed driving initiative designed to bring enthusiasts together for the simple joy of getting out on the road. It is about camaraderie, shared passion, and actually using the cars we claim to love. Chris makes the case that vehicles are meant to be driven, not preserved as static ornaments.

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I'd like to introduce to the backseat driver a fine fellow whose better half was on a few weeks ago, Sarah Rhodes, Absolutely passionate about Porsche and I get the distinct feeling she caught this malaise from a better half, Chris Rhodes.

So I'm delighted to welcome Chris Rhodes to the backseat driver.

Chris, welcome.

Oh, thank you for having me, Mark.

And I'm still surprised that you want to talk to me from me.

I have lots of other people who are desperate to talk to you rather than me.

Now, you come from something of a motoring background, including Lotus and rallying Ford Escorts, don't you?

Yes.

Well, when I was young, my father was the.

It was the service dealer for Yorkshire, but prior to that he was a rallying driver as well, and he got into the motoring trade as a cheap way to finance his cars, cheap parts and so forth.

And as I was describing, he had Marque Mexico with the Formula Ford engine in it.

Yeah.

And won various RSC rallies in it.

Yeah.

Over the years.

So I was brought up on that of sticky oil everywhere and then an open workshop to play with.

How did the Lotus come about as a.

He was a service dealer for them.

Was it this would have been when Lotus was, to a degree, in its infancy?

Oh, yeah, he was a prote.

I'm not going to say he was one of the first, but very.

You're talking very early 70s.

Yeah.

So he was approached in doing that.

And the difference between the main deal and the service dealer was the main deal, you had to have one of every car on display in the showroom and one of every car available as a demo.

And he told Colin Chapman to do one.

He's not going to do that.

So it was a kind of interim thing because there was a hole in the market.

They agreed to become a service dealer.

And in the end, I believe there's five or six service dealers across the country who were in the same position who said, don't stock all these cars and I'll just do the servicing for them instead.

So, yeah, so he had that dealership from early 70s and I think it finally stopped being a Lotus dealer in late 80s, early 90s.

It would have been something of a rarity back then, wouldn't be cars like.

That, the Lotus Uncle Jared.

Totally.

They were unusual to the point where people would obviously stop and look at them in the same way that you would look at a very unusual Lamborghini or something today with all the wings and so forth.

Especially if you get into the Esprit era.

Yeah.

And look at Them and go, what's that?

But then once everybody said what Lotus was, quite a lot of people didn't know what they were.

I mean, they had already by then started to develop quite a reputation in racing and everything else, but their road cars were still a rarity to be seen.

So I conclude you, your dad, although a service dealer, would have had quite a degree of kudos around the area.

Oh, yeah.

Because obviously at the end he was obviously the Lotus service dealer.

He was a Weber dealer, Solex dealer.

It was absolutely in there.

But as an actual thing, the Lotus was one that he had held for the longest and he generally held it because he tried getting rid of it a couple of times, the replacement main dealers would go bust.

Yeah.

So generally from my point of view is that a new dealer would come in, set it up and then go bust and he would come in with a van and clean them out of parts and say, thank you very much.

We had this massive mill in Bradford that was literally filled with.

I was like in the Louddin's cave of Lotus Park.

So you used to have people flying in from Australia and so forth and just say, can I just brummage in your back?

Yeah, of course.

Go there.

And they go, my God, you've got a Marconi LAN rear tail light.

I was 50 quid.

Yeah.

And that was how he brought it up, were he didn't want to make them.

I just made the money from it.

But not rip people off in that way.

Yeah.

He was also famous for when you went and got a carburetor replaced, you go get yourself a new weather.

He wouldn't chuck that carburetor away.

What he'd do is put it in his cannibal thing and they'd use.

In the end they were using the ultrasonic baths to clean them up.

Yeah.

But he'd also take all the springs a lot.

And if you went in there and said, I thought I knew how to do my carburettor, the spring off the.

The choke went and I've lost it.

Yeah, One second.

Which one is it?

Oh, you can have this at.

And that was the sort of thing rather than having to spend £20 on the service kit.

Yeah, it was.

It was an interesting place to be.

Did he actually run a Lotus?

Did he ever drive them about?

Yeah.

When I was a child, my mother had a blue with Silver Roof Lamplus 2.

Yeah.

And it was like.

Oh, I couldn't describe it, but like a disco ball roof.

Yeah.

And so we as kids, that was our.

That was the Mother's transportation.

She.

The story with that one actually goes that she took it into my father's garage and said for its service, somebody walked in off the street, said oh my God, I want that.

I will pay you what you want for it.

Yeah.

And he sold it and she came back and said where's my car?

And he says, ah, yeah, I've just sold that.

Somebody made me an offer I couldn't refuse and it gave me a Mark 1 escort that was at the back, had been sat there for years and said I'd just drive that instead.

Yeah.

And she was spitting feathers because her car had been sold up underneath it.

But that's how it kind of worked.

So we had.

And the main cars that we have would have the Longpulse 2 was the main Lotus.

There was a Lotus Excel, was mainly the normal family car floating around and generally what you would have is a demonstrator or anything that was floating around as a thing.

So one of the services he used to offer customers was that if you go and buy yourself a brand new Lotus you have to do a very regimented.

So this is the Esprit 2.2 and so forth.

So a deal.

He'd say to them, he said, look, transportation costs from Norfolk back to Brantford, £200 or.

Yeah, something like that.

He says for the same money I will go to Norfolk because I need to go to see the factory, any case, and I will drive your car back.

I will actually drive it gently all around until it gets to that 5 or 600 mile marker.

We could start opening it up a bit and give you the car with 500 miles and the number of customers who said yes please.

So as a thing I was.

I used to be picked up from school as a little six or seven year old and if your father was picking you up, it was a game of what car was he in.

He was either in a brand new Lotus with trade blades on, just come from the factory.

Yeah.

Or anything from a Cortina to.

To a Sierra or whatever was lying around or a Fiat Panda.

He's bar, is that my dad over the other side?

And he oh my God, it is.

And it would be sitting there laughing and waiting for me to spot which car it was in.

Yeah, because that's the other thing.

Like myself, you are.

And your dad was a serious Fiat Panda four wheel drive man, wasn't He.

Oh, God.

You know, we had two of them and we had.

Because they had the bit I remember as a child about the Panda was one was the rear seats, which was two bars with a bit of cloth dangling down.

That was the front seat as well.

That was the front seats as well.

True.

But the other one was the Fiat Panda was indestructible, which I'll talk about in a second, but was actually famous for.

We used to use Land Rovers up in Harrogate to do skiing down the fields near Pegu Bridge.

Yeah.

And the rescue car that was there to get the Land Rover out of trouble was the Fiat Panda.

Yep.

Used to pull Lundies out and it was that sort of thing there.

And you've seen, obviously, the Top Gear skits that have.

We're using this car as a whatever.

If your car breaks down, you get the old Beetle.

Yeah, that's how we operated.

We had this Fiat panel at the back of my father's garage for, oh, years.

And every time it came around for its mot, we'd have.

I think it's time for the Fear Panda to go to the great scrappy business character to go, I'll have a quick look.

And you go, oh, it just needs a little bit of welding.

Oh, my God.

The Panda lives for another day.

And if your car broke down or you crashed it or any other thing that a teenager would do, you'd end up with the Fiat Panda and you'd be like, have another car.

The Fiat Panda is yours, son.

And you're like, thanks, dad.

And he was indestructible.

Fanatic.

And because he used it winter over in Bradford.

Yeah, when it snowed, it really snowed.

And Panda was the car of choice.

That's one of the things about them.

I know we're digressing a little bit, but the Panda four wheel drive, the originals are now worth serious amounts of money.

And all the.

Such as the vineyard owners in Italy, who use an absolute knacker for driving around checking the grapes, now realise that people are prepared to pay between 6 and 8,000 pounds for them and then they'll spend another 10 to 15,000 having them restored.

They have become a serious car.

In fact, a friend of mine, racing driver Korsten LeBlanc, who spends a lot of time in the very exclusive skiing resorts during winter time and is heavily involved with Aston Martin, amongst other things, uses a Panda 4 before, he said, and anybody, he said, who has any status round there, he said, uses a Panda.

He said, if you turn up in a Range Rover or A Lamborghini or anything else to try and combat these snowy and icy conditions.

He said they're laughed at.

He said to have the true style, he said it's Fiat Panda four wheel drive.

And I was delighted because I might have other cars, but when it comes to general knocking about and doing navigation rallies and all such as that, I won't dream of using anything else.

But before Panda that sort of thing.

Is because we used to use this thing and I remember to engage four wheel drive was a little handle that you yanked vertically upwards.

Yes.

And hoped that it would engage.

And the second one was first gear was so pathetic that unless you were on a really steep hill, you just started in second like a dog and you just went, ah.

HE STARTS his second gear is a lot better.

Yeah, those original ones had a Steyr puck 4x4 system on them and as you said, you pulled a handle up next to you and eventually to grind itself into a all wheel drive.

And yes, even on my modern one though it's all electronic now and everything else, first gear is a very low gear.

It's mainly an off road gear.

So many a time I set off in second gear.

You just use it as a five speed gearbox, you ignore first.

And it's back in that era where cars were repairable.

Yes, I've got all this.

Fiat Panda is coming back from Haitley Bridge where I think the accelerator cable snapped and instead of my father just rigged it up and reused the choke cable.

So he's driving across the Yorkshire Dales at good old speed using the choke cable as the accelerator.

Yeah.

Because he's.

I'm not waiting for anybody to do this.

I can fix this now.

And this Panda's flying across the hills and he's pulling on the torque cable.

And I think the other thing is a lot of people don't realise that if driven correctly and you use the gears they are though they're only a tiny.

Even with a tiny engine they are extremely lively and if you drive them you need somebody in a serious car to be able to keep up with you on a country lane.

Yeah, I think because the other side of it is a lot of cars are too wide.

But yeah, if it's teeny tiny and it's doing correctly, they're good and I'm a great believer in those and other little Ray hot hatches.

They can be a lot better than some of the more high performance cars for having a good Fun hatch now.

Between Fiat Pandas and Porsche Just run us through your, the cars you've owned, the chronology of your automotive history.

I was actually thinking about this before we started this because somebody asked me the other day.

My first car was a y registered Skoda Estelle120 in orange that I bought for my brother in law for £95 with the idea that I could grass track it because I was trying to get into some form of motorsport.

And that idea got killed because my father had said I'd love to help you son but I promised you mother that I'd never get into motorsport.

After I pirouetted a court unity off a Welsh mountainside he says I'm worried about getting the bug again so I'd love to but no.

I ended up driving this thing and it was indestructible.

Yeah we had it running on two cylinders once because my father had put some gunk down to try and do it and it went to scrap heave heaven because of bear caliber I think it was in the end but it was great.

So from that point of view I was always brought up on the fact of a car will still get you to the destination irrespective of what it is.

You may enjoy it more but find a car that equal that.

So that was the first one, the next one was the funniest one because I went and got a job, what I call a proper job and my father in Bradford.

So the story with Bradford very quickly is, as you will probably know is there's a lot of what I call old school car dealers.

This is the jct 600 and so forth.

They're all electrolyte drivers.

It's all the same fraternity, it's all the same kind of club.

Yes, some of them might be more corporate under the thing but they all come from the same thing.

So everybody knows everybody.

So I get asked the also a question by my mother and said okay, you're now going to get a job in Taunton.

What do you, what are you going to get as a car?

Because I think we need to upgrade you a bit.

Yeah from that sort of thing.

And I'm like my friend's going to Turbo.

And I've worked out that it's one of the two unicorns with the hot hatches.

Unicorns, there's another SR and the Theodore Turbo Mark II are about five insurance groups lower than all the other cars, the RS Turbos or equivalents so they're cheaper to insure and of course so my father rings around and Finds one of his dealer friends who's got one and we go down there and the sale guy comes down the noob.

We know we do test drives on the Saturday, especially not for that car.

And then with the whiskers in his ear and he goes, oh, I'm really sorry.

And we go out and I saw him up to this day.

The sales guy goes, and he goes, just remember I have a wife and kids, okay?

I shoot up the roads, come back as a 19 year old with the biggest cheesy smile on your face and you go, oh my God, yes, I want this car.

It even has a gear knob that it's like a stress ball.

Yeah, I want it.

And it gets.

They just got said take.

We'll take the car off to ours, we'll do an evaluation, we'll make you an offer, the air bumps, but we'll drop it off.

So it sits at the back of my father's work for a month because we were going away.

Everybody's coming in, including the Fiat dealer going, oh, not one of those on a fan's like, why are they rare?

Well, kind of.

He goes, what do you mean?

He says, we made a few of them, but there's not a lot left.

Yes.

Why absolutely.

My only fastest straight line uses the corners.

Yeah.

And one of the mechanics said to him, and I still remember this conversation, he goes, what do you mean alphast?

He says, oh, no.

Prim Park Lane in Bradford.

If you came to live in Wattsit out of an XR2i at the top of Prim Park Lane, you'd be doing 70 miles down here.

Yeah, okay, I can understand that.

That little thing owner tower 3/4 up the hill is doing 110 and climb it.

It does not stop.

It's unbelievable.

So I finally got let loose in this car and I had my mother of all people take me out and show me how to drive a front wheel drive turbo car.

So that basically toll steering, all the other problems you get and that sort of thing.

And she came in to much of the joys of all the mechanics.

Did a full donut in the yard outside the mechanics where they get a round of applause and she said, oh, I quite like that guy.

Because my mother used to grass track and rally with my father.

All right.

She was quite used to doing those sort of things.

And she went, oh yeah, I like that one.

Yeah, yeah, I can see why he wanted it.

So, yeah, so we had that sort of thing and then we went back to do some more education out Cavaliers.

And then I had a Golf GTI Turbo, one of the Mark 4 ones.

That was a work car.

And then pretty well, I stayed Audi for a long time.

Yeah.

Doing S3s and TTs and stuff.

And the problem I had was a friend of mine actually said to me, says, you're doing silly miles and a gear.

It says, don't buy Mondeos or Repmobiles.

It says, go and buy yourself high end Audis.

That sounds wrong.

It says, no, no.

It says when you go and buy a car like that, yes, you're going to lose money because of the mileage, but you won't lose the same amount because it'd be so rare and somebody want that really nice car.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the worst one I ever did was I had a bright yellow Audi S3 with the bumblebee interior.

Yeah.

Send you a photograph.

It's black and white interior with Alcantara.

I need 40,000 miles in four and a half months in this community to Holland.

Yeah.

And lived in it.

And the dealer when I sold it was like, I don't know what to do with this.

I'm going to put it in a field and forget about.

Because it was just ridiculous.

And before we moved to New Zealand, I had a clear one eight, two, the Elf le car.

The world's worst seats that you've ever had.

So if anybody has ever had one of those, I could drive for half an hour and I would crawl out with chronic backache like I'd driven for six hours.

Hated the seats.

The car was beautiful because it took you back to that go kart feeling where a friend of mine have one.

He said, board my car, go round around about three times and see what you think.

I came back like, I'm going to have one of those.

That was fun from outside.

So then from that point of view, we spent time in Australia and New Zealand and pretty well from a Porsche point of view is I've been searching for my bike.

Old perfect Porsche.

Yeah.

What got you into Porsche?

A friend of mine once again was in the.

He has a car storage place down in Mitchell.

Deborah.

Yeah.

We were talking about sports cars and things and he'd seen, obviously the things I've had over the years and he says, look, he says, what you want?

And I went, what do you mean?

I says, I just want a reliable.

Oh, nice.

Found the thing.

Iron Audi R8.

Yes.

Topping the top in Mercedes, the AMGs that will build their kind of bulletproof.

Yeah.

Maybe an M3 or something like that.

Or Porsche.

Everything else ignore.

Yeah.

Ferrari will break down in you all the time and you'll still want it to drive it and it'll be have a flat battery or something.

Someone like you who does the driving.

I don't do a thousand miles a year.

The spider I've got has done 17,000 in two years.

Less than two years.

I properly dry.

I want to enjoy it.

And he says, you want the feeling of going out there.

So Porsche is your one that you would probably go on.

And of course my wife Sarah, when we were courting, I love what korting.

Good old fashioned word is that.

That's it.

She had a picture of a 911 on the back.

So the actual story with Porsche was a reasonably amusing one in the fact that my wife had an accident and she said, but this part of her rehabilitation, she needed 9 11.

That's wonderful.

You can buy it with your compensation you might get.

But because of COVID it all stayed on, on and on and being on my radar.

But I didn't know when I was ready or not.

And I actually got stuck in Sydney.

Yeah.

Covid and my son said to me, he said, oh, I plan to go for a birthday party.

And my friend of mine runs what was the jet ski lake in Reading, but is now a big inflatable affair near the M4.

And you want to go there, but I want to go there with four of my.

And of course I'm sat in a hotel room in Sydney going four friends, me as the driver, him as the thing that's six.

We have an arm, do three at the moment.

The day's the putting a child in the boot and saying, I can't do that with somebody else's kid.

I'll rent another car.

And this is where renting a voxel Corsa was £200 a day, minimum.

Two days.

Yeah.

And I went, I'm not spending 400 quid to rent a Corsa to go 60 miles to renting a buck.

I refuse.

So I sat there in there and concocted a plan that I would go to a BMW dealer that I'd bought cars from in the past and see if I could borrow one for the weekend.

And he had.

I had a 440 convertible.

Yeah.

The weekend I went, oh, my God.

Oh, we should buy another one of these.

Couldn't get a deal done with him, but then decided on the way home that we're going to go in Portia and find out where the hell Sarah's car was.

Yeah.

And then got told it wasn't ships now, it was wiring lures in the Ukraine, etc.

And I spun a line to them and said, I have aspirations of wind in my hair.

There's sort of my face and everything.

And you're ruining it because of your problems with your supply chain.

And they said, we'll sell you a car.

Yeah, of course, you'll sell me at a car dealership.

No, we'll give you a special deal.

Yeah.

So they offered and said, look, buy a car from us and we'll guarantee the depreciation of that car on a month by month basis.

Yeah.

So that obviously the longer you have the car, the more we do it.

The store do more than 5,000 miles you could find.

And I ended up with a 718 Spider manual gearbox and everything.

Love the car.

Apart from it had Michelin pilot sport cup tyres on.

And I learned the hardware that in winter, even though you've riven it for a good hour, it still will slide out of the head at the moment's notice.

Yeah, it's a bit like my sports car.

Technically it runs on the pilots, but wintertime it still runs on Michelin pilots, but they are the all weather all terrain pilots.

Very few people nor Michelin do them, but they're a lot softer, they have a more aggressive tread.

And actually I'd run the car all the all year on them because I don't find it too bad.

And you don't have to keep looking at the temperature, thinking, Christ, one degree less and these damn things won't work.

Yeah.

Something is.

I've my favorite unlock sport two maxis, what they're called.

Yeah.

That 45 minutes of getting them a little bit warm.

And I watch, I look at the pine pressure gauge.

Yeah.

And as long as it goes up like 0.2 bars, are you getting ready?

And I'll test it on a roundabout and give it a little bit of a kick.

Yeah.

And it'll tell me whether it's ready or not.

And once that.

Once they get.

There's still.

Obviously if you really push it, it will have you.

Yeah.

But the slip out that you got was there.

Because once again is I don't do tracks.

I'm like, it's not.

That wasn't my thing.

My thing is a spirited drive up a mountainside where I get the thrill of the noise and the ambience of everything going around me.

Doing the 180 on the corner and then powering it up to the next stretch.

Yeah, I don't do.

I don't lose.

I don't do circuit anymore.

If Somebody said, why don't you bring your Alpine down?

I said, no.

I said, I have no age to drive on circuits anymore.

I said, but if I did, I would want a proper track car.

I said, I'm not using my road car.

Wearing out the tires, wearing out the brakes, boiling the fluids and everything else.

I said, this is where people go wrong, tracking their ordinary cars.

Why did my car break?

Yeah, you went for it.

And this kind of goes to the basic thing where I was brought up to look after.

If you look after a car, you look after you.

Yeah.

Every so often, check the tire pressure.

Every so often, check the fluids.

Every so often, a quick sniff at the oil and windscreen wipers.

Just.

It's a risk of doing a long journey to have a little check around.

Yeah.

Nobody does it.

And my two kids have passed the test so far and we spent time doing this.

And Grindelwald, if it's often just do it.

Because that's the difference between you being dumb to the side of a road.

I'm actually getting to your destination.

It's just doing it in a similar fashion.

Hear a weird noise, don't ignore it.

Weird noises go out of cars for a reason.

Did you hear me going wrong?

It's going to dump me at some point.

But that's the kind of thing that.

So, yeah.

So from the Porsche point of view is their other thing.

And so I've always had a.

Like a love affair with unusual Porsches.

Yeah.

And I got fixated about a Speedstone and I went, oh, my God, that is a beautiful car.

This was the 991 speedster.

And I'm like, oh, I'd love one of them.

But I'd love the whole experience of stacking it up for what I want.

Yep.

Not what is the best resale value or anything stupid like that, is what do I want?

And of course, in talking to them, I said, any chance we could get a Speedster?

And they said, we don't make them.

I want to talk about the next one.

I want it.

That will appear in four, five, six years time.

And they went, yeah, you pick one of the more hard ones to get.

I know this.

So from that point of view is we've worked together, we've had quite a few cars through them on the pretense of, look, we'll tie all these cars for two reasons.

We'll find out what I like from a car point of view.

But also you get lots of sales.

And into getting lots of sales, hopefully you'll put me further up at the 1 tick list for the possibility of being gracious.

What I do.

So we'll have to wait and see what happens on that one.

But pretty well from the Porsche current lineup.

I think it's a Cayenne is the only one I've not had.

Yeah.

I've had one of every other ones.

And we've had foibles where you go.

We had a GTQ touring car actually light up.

Bit hard from a suspension point of view.

It did remind you it was a GT race car.

Yeah.

Quite often was you going down the road to.

Even the winged stuff on the GT4s are hard.

Which went.

It's a little bit too much attention for what I like.

Yeah.

You know.

So when you look at it, you go, it's very popular, that car in the street.

That's not really what I'm wanting as such.

To where I am at the moment, which I have a bright yellow which obviously does attract quite a bit of a Spider S. Which at the moment I actually would say if you said to me, chris, you cannot have another car in your life.

I would be like a piggy.

Mud and happy.

And I'll just keep this water.

Yeah.

Because it actually does everything where it's actually softer than the previous Spider we had.

And all the other GT cars.

Yeah.

They've tuned it down a bit.

It's pleasant to drive.

It does all the noise and the ambience.

Because of the induction.

I end up picking mud.

Yeah.

And.

And it really is.

And it's just.

It's.

Hence it's done 17,000 miles in a lot of 21s.

Yeah.

And it will probably hit 20 plus by the time it gets to.

I think that's the One thing about 911s and is when we were talking off air.

I've spent a lot of time with them.

You can actually use them as an everyday car.

I was once chatting with the late Alan de Cadenet because a friend of mine who had a Collection of EX works911s owned a particular one, a911tr lightweight that DE Cadenet had driven in the Targa Florio.

This corridor had a history file as thick as War and Peace.

And the one thing de Cadenet said was because he drove them during the time when Porsche, the factory would drive the cars to the events, providing they didn't crash them, would then drive them back to the factory.

They didn't trailer them about.

And de Cadenet said.

He said, you can get in it in Vizsach, drive it to where you're going, he said, race it, he said, you can go shopping in it, you can go touring in it, he said, you can do other things in it which we can't go into on air.

But he said, they're probably the most versatile sports car come racing car, he said, and the most reliable you will ever climb behind the wheel of.

He said.

The other great thing is, he said, if they've no numbers on them, he said, you can park them at the side of the road, he said, especially in Germany and Austria and places like that, he said, nobody gives them a second glance, he said, he said, they've got to be the best sports car you will ever drive.

But people don't.

People don't look at Porsches quite as much as Ferraris.

There isn't the envy.

Yeah.

You wouldn't see.

I don't care about my cars, but we do lots of European tours type thing.

And I wonder.

I'm like, it's parked in the car park.

Yeah, it looks fine.

And I wander off and go out and sometimes the wife is like, you sure?

Yeah.

Be fine.

Yeah.

And in touch with.

Nothing's ever happened where.

Yeah.

If you have something.

I suppose I am a little bit concerned about something like a GT3RS that's very wiggy.

I'm not sure whether the same applies to that.

But as a generalized Porsche, people go, oh, that's a very nice car.

But it gets the very nice car thing.

Not.

I'm jealous of it, I want to wreck it just because I can.

Which you get that feeling with some of the more exotic stuff like the Ferraris and the Lamborghinis that shout at you.

Yeah.

Every now and then, for whatever reason, I go through or pass through, I tend not to stay because I can't afford the cost of a cup of coffee.

But every now and then you head through Monaco, you see all these cars, they queue up at the casinos and the hotels and I'll be quite honest, the people who drive them, a, they have them as a status symbol.

And a status symbol in Monaco is damned hard to get your hands on because everybody else has got one.

One.

And I don't know whether it's just me, but you look at them and you think, I really wouldn't want to spend any time with these people.

But Porsche drivers tend to be a bit different.

I've always said they're a little bit more down to earth.

And that's what you're looking for if you ever get a chance.

There is a beautiful.

I can't remember.

There is a Top Gear or a Grand Tour episode one of the two, where the trio were outside the Cafe de Paris and the casino.

And obviously they're saying the problem is that you go and drive up in your Bugatti or whatever it is, and it'll stay out the front until something better comes along.

Yeah.

And it was the case of how can you guarantee your car out there?

And the winning car can't remember what it was.

But it was something that was impossible for the concierge to drive.

Stipid.

And that was the only reason this didn't get put in the garage with everything else.

Yeah.

But it is.

There's.

I've been through there quite often that we used to do some work out there.

And, yeah, it's the workmanship of who's got a better car.

And that's not the world I in.

Because going back to cars is everybody's.

The house is their castle, but every car is their castle as well.

That what you find enjoyable about the car that's outside your house today?

Somebody might not.

Or vice versa.

Yeah.

Just suddenly go, oh, my God, I hate the Pandas.

And we go, you've obviously never driven one.

They're not going to convince them.

But on the other side of it, you go, oh, yeah.

Actually, it's.

I can see your point.

Because if everybody's the same in the world's boring.

Everybody needs to have that sort of thing.

And I was brought up on the other one other side, where people who shout what they are and what they've got, nine times out of ten don't.

No.

And one of the most beautiful stories I've got.

I've got to try and remember what the pub is.

But my father used to lease Lotuses out to local businesses and so forth, and he had a pair of Series 3 Lotus Esprits that were bent it to a computer firm or whatever it is somewhere in the Hartford area.

They were both going for service or end of lease, so we had the pair of them.

But the prior week we turned up in this Series 1 Land Rover pickup with children tied to the roof bars of the.

All the things you can't do nowadays.

Yeah.

And told, stay outside, I'll give you a Coke.

And it was.

I think it was a malt shovel somewhere between Bingley and Skipton, but it was the place to be seen polishing your Porsche on a Sunday.

And this battered Landover turns up and somebody said something to my father that got his wig up and he made a passing comment and so forth.

And the following week, Radar says, we're going to doing different transportation.

And so we went in.

My mother was driving one of these ospreys and he had the other in a child in each leaf and he turned up part of them right next to each other, found the guy to the biggest raspberry and pointed his carrier down the fingers.

And literally the biggest open sheet format was they were one after another on the registration plate.

Yeah, it was slack.

I think the following week, I think it was three Lotus Excels got turned up one after another.

And somebody says, you've really annoyed the Lotus dealer in Yorkshire.

And I think he's going to win this game because that was the way I was brought up, was take somebody down a peg or two.

But not by the most obvious way, because if you're trying to play the win orchestra, you can get up with somebody who beats you, but at the end of the day, do it with a smile.

And that's how I can overwork that.

But that's the kind of think I was.

Was done.

Now, the other thing you do is pirate runs, is it not?

Oh, yes.

How did this come about and what exactly is it?

So simple thing from a pirate run point of view is what we talked about earlier is I like driving and I like driving a lot.

And my motto, it simply is, I have spent time and energy and I'd sit through a 9 to 5 job working during the week.

At the weekends, I want to enjoy the spoils of my toils.

Yeah.

And go out there and you can only go to the pub so many times, or what a beautiful car I have as you sip a half a chandelier because you can't drink any more than that or else you get arrested.

Doesn't do it for me, standing there looking at your car.

I'd rather stand looking at my car at the end of the day with mud splattered over the roof and a bit of twig hanging off one of the wing mirrors, that, to me is heaven.

You've driven it.

Yeah.

So the big thing about it was simply is I like going out, going to see new things.

But the other bit that's missing is I actually like when you stop off somewhere having a conversation with somebody.

Yeah.

So from a point of view, the pirate run thing was born by my wife and just said, look, why don't we invite friends and other people along to these kind of runs you're doing?

So we've done Day runs.

We've done weekend runs.

And the idea is.

Yeah.

Chris and Sarah fancies a trip away somewhere.

Would you like to come with us?

Yeah.

And you can keep up with you.

And from that point of view, it's not a race.

And we generally have 10 cars or something that come to us.

And what we kind of do is stagger it, where, if you want to go a little bit faster, follow Chris and the spider.

If you want to be at the back of the queue, Sarah will make sure you don't get lost.

Yeah.

But the idea is go and drive the thing that you've worked so hard for, because if you put it in the garage, you polish it, you do all the bits and pieces for it.

That's great.

But somebody told me the most amazing thing a few years ago that said all the material items that surround you today, houses, watches, cars or anything you do are going to be somebody else's property in the future.

Yes.

Because you're not around, memories are yours to take with you.

And I thought, that's a brilliant light.

Yeah.

And it simply is.

So power rules from that point of view is we just organize bits of pieces and say, do you want to come?

Yeah.

And you can come in whatever car you fancy.

So it's not exclusively Porsche, it's a.

Porsche community thing we have.

But obviously, from that point of view, we've had people who've apologised, oh, my Porsche had a technical problem.

Would you mind if I come in my clear V6?

From that sort of thing, I'm going to draw the line.

It's obviously returned up in a 1.2 Corsa that's got, like, 50 horsepower.

It may be problematic, but on the other side of it is just come with a smile.

Yeah.

But my side is, we are a Porsche thing.

But on the other side of it is, if you come with the right attitude, you're more than welcome, because just come drive your car that you've served up and that you admire and you enjoy, because, let's say one day it won't be there, you won't be able to do it.

But these sort of runs out with, like, clubs or whatever, are becoming increasingly popular.

There's more and more popping up here, there and everywhere.

When you say you're going to do something, do you have problems attracting people or have they all become friends?

And it's a case of Chris and Sarah going, here, we're not doing anything.

That weekend, off we go.

Okay, you.

It depends on your attitude and how you frame it up.

If you're determined to attract lots of people, it will become fraught.

So the way that I think of it is Chris and Sarah, or what we're actually doing at the moment is we're inviting some of the more established members to do a run for themselves.

As in, you organize a weekend and will come.

But the idea is go and organize a weekend that you're going to enjoy.

Tell people about what you're going to do and if you want to come, they're more than welcome.

Yeah.

And if you do it as a free spirited thing is if one person turns up, brilliant.

If you go two or three new people, even better.

If you get to see your old friends you haven't seen for a couple of months, it's great.

Take away all the pressure about everything and a lot of the, A lot of the.

How some clubs have been run in the past away and just go, look, Chris and Sarah are gonna have fun.

If nobody turns up.

Chris and Sarah still have a lovely weekend.

Yeah.

Do you organize the accommodation, et cetera, or is that up to each individual?

So in the case where we've done it, where we've gone away, I've basically what we just said is we're going to be at this sort of hotel area, this is when we're going to stop.

And it's more of a suggestion.

The problem you get with accommodation simply is it's twofold.

Is one, a lot of places don't have a lot of rooms.

Yeah.

And this second is as soon as you start booking at speed, the price shoots up.

Yeah.

So it literally is.

You try to accommodate people in that way, but the idea is a free spirit.

And we did a run in the Cotswolds where some people said, look, we'll do the Saturday with you, we'll do a little bit the Sunday, but we actually want to go and spend a bit of time in Method.

Yeah.

Ricky, sometimes you've told us, I really don't care because I just don't want to go, oh my God, we're so and so shit, have we lost them?

That's my only concern to make sure that you as a person's okay if you want to go and do something with your wife in birthdays for the rest of the afternoon, go and enjoy yourself.

That's all it's about.

And simply that's it is take away the pressure of this and turn up and it's been great so far.

We've had some really good runs.

We're doing stuff down in Cornwall and looking to do bits and pieces abroad.

But it's all under the banter of Chris and Sarah or alternative, somebody else from the CORP group who's been around for a long time and said, I'm going to organise something in Wales.

Yeah, we will be there.

And that is.

It's not really an advertisement, it's just if he finds it, get in contact.

Yeah.

If he's not for you, don't worry about it.

That's my attitude to a lot of things where I'm never ever going to try and pressurize somebody into doing something or feel that they have to me as Chris and only do the pub.

Looking at the car so many times.

I mean you mentioned like sitting, washing and polishing it.

That's an anathema to me.

I mean my, my toys sat in the garage absolutely filthy.

So I have a deal with one of the podcast sponsors, Specialized Automotive Services, who I give them a ring the day before and say, look, I'm doing such and such a thing.

I've been asked to take it here and I take it over and the guy that does the washing, polishing and detailing pops out and very kindly cleans it for me.

God, I'm disgusted in you, Mark.

As a person now I'm worse.

I am what I call a lazy detailer.

So once again, going back to my father's business was if you wanted anything, you had to work.

Yeah.

And that is something I'm a great believer in.

Metadi sublimited me troll bikes and various other bits and pieces.

And with that.

But you detailed the cars.

So we did have a showroom at one point and I would be the person who washed it.

Yeah.

So I washed lunches and you learn how to do it quickly and efficiently and what to what I call a 75% fine.

Yeah.

And my literally regime of is it with a jet wash, I spin around with it and then squirt some of the pre wash to fall, give it a bit of snowfall and then with the brush on the thing go, ba ba ba ba.

The spider is ppf.

So it's actually a lot easier.

Yeah.

But it's literally there and maybe.

Oh my God, you must spend ages on that.

I really just.

I can do that car from start to end in about 20 minutes tops.

Including speaking to the neighbors as I'm doing it.

Yeah.

It's zero, zero effort from that side.

Yeah.

With Jotun, where I've.

We've been abroad, where I've gone to a two euro jet wash and not even touched the car and just Stood there with dead flies.

Go away.

That sits Aries.

And that's the kind of thing there because it's minimal empathy.

But also these are kind of the skills that you learn.

Yeah.

I'm still surprised to this day that I'm actually still alive in some of the stuff where now you have this cotton wool bud around everybody.

You can't do this, can't do that.

I think I was talking to someone the other day about the things that I used to do as a child.

And when I was a child, I was talking maybe 10.

So picture this, a rolling road with an A2cc.

What was it, a Yamaha CX?

I think it would be.

Yeah, it's a CX trailbike.

No straps, rear wheel on the roller.

Seeing how fast I could get the speedo to go.

Yeah.

The list of things that could go wrong was endless.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One wrong move in 30 mile an hour worth of trail bike.

The other one was the other demonstrator for the first of the electronic ignition stuff.

Yeah.

And there was this dome with a spark plug in it that would show you the different spark sparks when you change the settings of this electronic ignition.

Yeah.

Completely exposed.

You could put your finger in it.

Right.

So going back to that, it just.

Oh, my God, how have I actually survived these things?

But on the other side of it, it taught me the minimalistic things to do, but it also taught me that my father bought how to floor paint a garage.

Yeah.

My deal with my father was you buy a car, you insure the car, you put petrol in the car, I will service the car.

But it will cost you floor plating over Easter.

Yeah.

Because Yorkshire does a weird thing where you don't get good Friday.

You never used to get good Friday off.

You have the Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday off of Oyster.

And that was the longest period of time you could have to do the floor painting.

So.

Yeah, all the floor painting.

What my father didn't say was when you completely muller a Vauxhall cavalier on the M1 and cause a few people to miss Oasisbeth's gig at Nebworth, that the repair costs for the Cavalier covered under the terms of that agreement.

Yeah.

It's still a debatable thing.

The remains of the Cavalier will arrive in about four hours.

Yeah.

Providing you don't know that with your Porsches.

The weird thing is, and hopefully you appreciate this is with your Alpine, is you get a new car.

You're very precious about the car.

Yeah.

Because obviously you spread lots of time.

The thing you need to do with that car, you need to mark that car because once you have a little scratch or something on it, the pressure disappears.

Yeah.

The Spider RS was probably.

Actually, no, all the ones we had.

The worst one was that we had a GT4 and we had a stone go through all of the windscreen properly went through, I think, on the first 20 miles of its life.

Yeah.

And so that was there.

But the Spider, it literally has.

It's got threadite brakes, so the gap between the caliper and the inside of the wheel is very tight.

Yeah.

And I went on one of our first weekends when we got it went down a road that had just been resurfaced.

Yeah.

And I stupidly went, I'll go down slowly.

I believe the actual way he's supposed to go is hammered down there, but I went through slowly and he got a few stones caught between the callipathy and all the inside of the front wheels are scored.

So it was when I was going, oh, my God, you must be going, the car is marked down.

Yeah.

I'm chilled about this.

I can go enjoy myself anymore.

I can go and enjoy myself.

It's completely marked on that.

And apart from a few bullet holes in the ppf, it is safari quite well.

Yeah.

But, yeah, it's.

That sort of thing is you want a car to look nice, but on the other side of it is I've got marks on wheels and stuff where I go, where I could get that repaired, but it's not major enough yet.

And then I'll have perfect wheels again and I'll be wanting.

I'll be waiting for the marks to come, but I'll leave it.

Yeah, be fine.

It's that sort of thing there where a car is there to be used because you have this awful quandary.

And I found this out.

The hardware in Porsche land is obviously, you can go buy a new car and you go and put miles on it, but if you buy a secondhand car that has not a lot of miles on it, gets into this awful thing.

It is a special one where it's called an investment, but it comes into this investment thing where you go.

If I go from a thousand miles to 2,000 miles, this thing, it drops significantly.

Very similar to the old days when you drive a car out of a dealership and you go, oh, it's gonna hurt.

Yes.

So I made a new rule that basically I either buy new, new new cars or I buy ones with city miles.

And I was looking at.

I believe it's.

Is it Cridford's down exit away.

Yeah, I've got a really super.

We've got some really nice stuff in there.

And we had a. I can't remember what it was a left hand drive R930RS type thing and we're nicely poor, maybe.

Yeah, they were really old as the date.

And he goes, oh, it's done a hundred thousand kilometers.

I went, oh my God, that's gorgeous.

Anyway, sit up on the back.

Oh, no, no, that's perfect for me.

And I was in a few months ago, the guys at Collections around the corner from our household, we popped in there a few times and talking to the team there who were obviously trying to sell you lots of nice cars and from your world back, it's definitely worth a visit.

But he's oh, career G2s, what have you got?

And I said, oh my God, these are the.

Oh my God, there are ones out there in the market that have done 70,000 miles.

Yeah.

Yes.

If I come to some money, that is what I would love.

Something that's had that mileage worth me sticking an extra 20,000 miles does not give a hoot tonnage price.

It's already an equivalent high mileage car, so it's never going to get any worse.

And that to me is heaven.

Where it's got a stone Tuboro mark on it, it's got wear and tear on the seats, so forth.

Yes, you can get it all nice lit up again, but it's had a good life.

It's not been sat under a cover in a garage and they're not done any miles and dare I say, been started every so often to make sure it's working and never moved.

Because we all know the start of the car is a bit where the damage has been done.

So it's not a perfect car, it's just not being anywhere.

I used its purpose as a car's God so that if I buy my answer by New Year's resolution, my resolution with cars is don't buy ones that have got hardly any bars on them.

Yep.

I once learned that to my cost with a Jaguar.

However, Chris Rhodes, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and chatting with you.

Very quickly, if somebody wants to get into these pirate runs, how do they do it?

There is a beautiful Instagram account called Pirate Runs.

So you look at that and there is a website that just generally shows the instagram account called pirateruns.com but look from that point of view.

Yeah, look, have a look at what we do.

It's for you.

Give us a shout and I say from that point of view and stuff to seeing it because the simple reason is the more new people I meet, the more interesting I think I am.

It really is that and it's just because the end of the day is we all work hard during the week but after that you're like, fine, I want to go and enjoy my weekend but I want to do something different.

I want to see something new I like.

I'm the awful person where I like alleyways and it sounds the most bizarre thing is you walk through London, don't look at the road you're on when you're walking, look at the alleyways down the back and you find the most interesting things.

I want to do that in a car.

I want to go to somewhere completely new.

Yeah.

What happens if you turn left?

Chris Rolled.

It's been a pleasure chatting.

Thank you very much indeed for joining me on the backseat driver.