Pimp My Own Ride

Eventually I passed my driving test. I think it was on the seventh try. Without going into all the details, I kept turning up to the test centre in a car that wasn’t quite roadworthy, lol. I was always tinkering, with a fluffy steering wheel cover, trying to change the seats, and hooking random stuff up to the battery.

My first car didn’t last very long. I have to say it was all quite distracting. A laptop wired into the fold-out screen in the dashboard, blaring Fall Out Boy, Rooster and Panic! At The Disco.

I’ve only had one car accident in my life, and this was it. (Footnote: I wasn’t found at fault, as I was stationary, although more focus probably would have meant I could have moved out of the way.)

My first car was a Ford Focus and had a bit of kit in it. I found a chop shop in Brighton that could deck it out with extra speakers, a fold-down screen from the dash and the roof, and some sweet rims. Then people kept trying to steal them. I had a locking nut on the wheels, so they never managed at first. But you quickly learn that one nut isn’t enough when you don’t realise the other three have been stolen. Next thing you know, you turn a corner and the wheel falls off and starts rolling down the road.

The next car was a Honda Civic LSi ’93 (the same as the Fast and Furious hijacking cars, but an earlier model), and I thought, this time I’ll do it myself, and it was insane.

I salvaged the fold-out screen from the dash and the fold-down one from the roof and started going to town. I bought a load of MDF from B&Q and some boot carpet, asked Log’s dad if I could borrow his drill, and went all in.

Screens in the headrests. Screens in the boot. Videos playing on loops. A PlayStation 2. Wireless controllers. Terrestrial TV.

The only things missing were a hot tub and a fish tank. If there’d been room, I honestly think I would have gone for it.

Mates would pile in just to see what I had added this week. Someone always had a controller in their hand. Someone else was changing the DVD. Half the time the engine was running purely to keep everything powered.

We would drive around listening to 5ive, Backstreet Boys and Justin Timberlake, the car glowing like a spaceship inside, rattling slightly from all the extra wiring and badly fitted panels.

The only things missing were a hot tub and a fish tank. If there had been room, I honestly think I would have gone for it.

The kit in the car started to completely outprice the value of the car itself, and I have to say I became quite paranoid about being robbed. There was literally no security system at all.

Ed and I would sometimes drive around just for fun, picking up friends and dropping them off like an Uber.

Once we got a call from a friend, who we’ll call “Jim”, who had started falling in with a bad crowd. The sort of crowd where some of them would steal their grandma’s jewellery, let alone £3,000 worth of kit bolted into my car.

So I said to Ed, “Mate, do me a favour. Let’s hide everything, turn it all off. It’s dark and we’ve got tinted windows, so with everything off it’s hard to see. And don’t mention it when Jim gets in.”

We both agreed.

The second Jim got in the car, Ed goes, “HAVE YOU SEEN THE SCREENS?!”

I was absolutely fuming.

But ultimately, nothing happened. Thankfully I don’t think Jim said anything to anyone.

Eventually, by the time I got to uni, the car was so low that the exhaust kept hitting speed bumps. For about six months it had this terrible rattling noise, then one day we hit a really high bump and there was a massive bang. After that, it sounded incredible.

In hindsight, I realised the hole in the exhaust piping had grown so big that it effectively bypassed the muffler and catalytic converters. The engine suddenly sounded like an absolute beast, lol.

But over time the rubbish piled up, the MOT bills got bigger, and reality slowly caught up with me. I sold the rims, and the rest went for scrap.

Now I ride forest bikes.