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history
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les histoires et nouvelles du site
| 13
April 2008 News of the next Kent Run has reached me. It will be held on Sunday 25th May 2008. Meet at the services at Junction 8 of the M20 from 10am, leaving at 11am sharp! The destination is Belmont House near Faversham, where there will be a reduced entrance fee of £5.50 to view the house and gardens. For more info look at their website www.belmont-house.org. For more info on the run, contact Derek Flavell at Renospeed. A couple of other bits of news: firstly, I added a few Renault 4 pics from Lisbon to the Mystery Cars page last month, following a short work trip in which I was reacquainted with my old R4 friend Fernando Palma. See entries MC185-187 for those. Additionally, a few more snaps of my own dear Reflexia are to be found on the My Pics page of the Gallery (MP35-36), including some shot in the brief but heavy snow in Sussex earlier this month. |
| 2
March 2008 There was a programme on the box in Britain the other night about island getaways. It featured a guy visiting Madagascar, already a mythical place in the minds of many Renault 4 enthusiasts, due to the abundance of such cars that are believed to exist there. At one stage in the film, he jumped into an R4 for a ride to a remote village, and passed a pathetic and annoying comment about the car being 'dangerous', for no other reason than it not resembling the sort of rubbish he's probably used to seeing himself in his regular, smarmy travels. It is this sort of useless remark that has always plagued the Renault 4 in Britain at least, in altering people's perceptions about the vehicle and causing many to see it as some outmoded and unsafe car of yesteryear. It only serves to swell the sort of prejudice witnessed in other drivers whenever one is behind the wheel of an R4, whereby others will do anything they can to overtake, even though the person driving the 4 is going no slower than anything else on the road, and which over time makes owning and driving a Renault 4 more hazardous in having to account for everybody else's stupidity. The reporter's name was Toby, and I can't help being slightly biased in believing that all persons of such namesake are invariably middle class, live in Islington and have a son named Jake who they drive with their New Media Creative Consultant wife to the local opt-out school in a pretentiously oversized deRanged Rover. It's a whimsical and unsupported summary of the average Toby, but none more so than his original comments were about the R4. Meanwhile, I had my own island getaway last weekend, spending a few days in Sicily and spotting a few Renault 4s during the stay. You can find them at entries MC181 - MC184 in the Mystery Cars section of the Gallery. |
| 27
January 2008 A belated happy new year to Renault 4 owners! As has not been unusual in recent times, I've not been making such frequent updates here, but nine years on from my first workings on creating this site and there's a real possibility I'll finally find time later this year to improve it. I don't know why I even bother saying that because previous murmurings of this type have resulted in nothing happening. Anyway, one recent change that has been major work for me but will be of little note for most of you, lies in the various feedback forms around Renault 4-Play. As suggested in a previous update, a feature has been added to protect against the spamming that has been making daily examination of my email inbox such hell over recent years. Contrary to the original suggestion, though, this is a standard CAPTCHA technology rather than a question & answer as proposed. The CAPTCHA technique is not my most favoured method of combating FormMail spam, not least because I myself sometimes have trouble seeing what the characters are, but it's the only practical way to fight the problem at present. If you fill out any of the forms on this site (for the advert submissions, guestbook entries, etc.) you'll now need to identify the CAPTCHA text, so apologies in advance if you find this awkward. You can refresh the page to get a new CAPTCHA image if you find the first example impossible to decipher. Setting this up has stolen my weekend, which could have been more enjoyably spent adding more interesting features to this site, but it will save me between 10 and 15 minutes of wasted energy every day from hereon, in not having to filter through so much junk mail. Just one other quickie for the moment: see the Mystery Cars page (number MC179) for a colourful start to 2008! |
| 17 September
2007 Last chance to return entry forms for the Renault 4 gathering at Lohéac, France on 6th - 7th October. These must be submitted by 21st September. From the wording on the form, it would appear that there is a requirement for any R4 entered to be in 'perfect exhibiting condition'; something I was unaware of until now. Due to various sudden events and work commitments, I shall not be attending myself, but if you go please send any photos or other news from the event to this site. Another call goes out to anybody owning a RHD early model Renault 4: please get in touch if you would like your car to be considered for feature in a book and at an exhibition at the Tate Modern in autumn 2008 (see notes from 4 August, below). To date there is no joy in locating a suitable vehicle, so any classic from the 1960s might do. My own car, Reflexia, just completed a round trip to the Netherlands, with a photo featuring on the My Pics page of the gallery (number MP34). Several hundred miles clocked but not a single other Renault 4 to be seen throughout the journey. |
| 4 August 2007
(en français - voyez
ci-dessous) The 46th anniversary of the Renault 4 passed yesterday, and rather peculiarly, Renault seem to want to celebrate this by staging an event partly commemorating the '45th' birthday of the car. The International Gordini Revival will be a gathering primarily geared towards Gordini owners, but in the official publicity letter from Renault - witnessed by myself - they include a sentence at the end with a special invite to all R4 owners! There will be various events taking place and a chance for drivers to take to the racetrack at Lohéac, France, where the meeting will be held on the weekend 6th - 7th October 2007. I will post more details as and when they become available. If you are planning on travelling from the UK, contact either myself, or alternatively Derek Flavell at Renospeed, since it might be possible to negotiate some special rates. Why Renault are regarding this as the 45th year is not certain. It could be a simple oversight, or perhaps there is some reasoning based on the R3 being the initial offering when the series was launched in 1961, and maybe they are contesting that R4 sales did not officially begin until the following year. And as for why they are extending their invitation to all R4 owners, conspiracy theories abound! A simple friendly gesture perhaps? Do they have some unexpected news for us, like the proposed launch of a retro 4 successor? Maybe they just fear that not enough Gordini owners will make it along, and they've chosen another old Renault model with the most plentiful numbers still remaining, so as to beef up the numbers. All shall be revealed, maybe, on the 6th October. Other Renault 4 meetings are planned this summer, with the IV International 4L Meeting taking place at Alentejo in the south-east of Portugal, next weekend the 11th - 12th August. Visit this website for more details. Also see the update below from 23 April, concerning a Renault 4 gathering in mid-France, on the 25th - 26th August. For anybody awaiting news on the Polish R4 Club meeting in Slovakia / Hungary, as outlined below, please note that the tour has been cancelled due to the lack of time available for planning. I am informed that this event will instead be planned for next year, and will be bigger, better and organised much earlier in advance. Another interesting piece of news reached me this week: 'design guru' Stephen Bayley is preparing a book detailing 86 landmark cars in automotive design. Respected photographer Tif Hunter shall be providing illustrations, and suitable vehicles are being sought for inclusion in the publication. The book is due to be launched at the Tate Modern in London during the autumn 2008, with some of the vehicles featured in the book on display at the museum. A Renault 4 from 1961 is required, although the closest match would be accepted if the specific model cannot be located. Owners of the featured vehicles will be presented with a complimentary signed copy of the book. If you can help, send photographs of your model to Mike Hallowes and Sue Allatt. My own R4 has just returned from Derek's Renospeed garage following some MOT work, most of it welding. Despite its rusty appearance, the car is still good and I hope to join Derek on the trip to Lohéac in October. One last minor piece of news: I have finally begun to overhaul the various feedback forms around the site (for sending adverts, signing the guestbook, etc.) in order to counteract the vast quantities of spam I receive through these on a daily basis. If you use these forms, you will shortly notice that some simple questions have been added. The answers should be obvious to anybody using the site, but the forms will not be submitted successfully if answered incorrectly. En français - L'anniversaire 46ème de la quatrelle s'est passé hier, et plutôt étrangement, il semble que Renault veut célébrer ceci en montant un événement qui commémore - en partie - l'anniversaire '45ème' de la voiture. La Reprise Internationale de Gordini sera un rassemblement principalement pour les propriétaires de Gordinis, mais dans la lettre de publicité officielle de Renault - a vu par moi-même - il inclut une phrase à la fin avec une invitation spéciale à tous les propriétaires de 4Ls! Il sera des événements divers se passer et la chance pour les conducteurs à faire le course à Lohéac, France, où le rassemblement va être monté pendant le weekend 6 - 7 octobre 2007. Si vous avez plus de détails, veuillez les envoyer à moi pour inclure sur cette page. Aussi, un rassemblement de 4L est organisé le 25 - 26 août aux Circuits de Charade, près de Clermont-Ferrand. Cliquez ici pour un fichier PDF avec un lien d'email. |
| 23 June
2007 As far as R4 activities go, news of another event reached me recently, by way of Maciek Grabowski in Poland. He says the Renault 4 Club Poland are organizing the Renault 4 Castle Tour 2007: Eastern Slovakia. It's a one week trip for Renault 4s covering 23 Slovakian and 4 Hungarian castles, about 1,300km in all. The excursion is planned for August or September, with more info to follow. Contact the Club for further details. Meanwhile, the 2007 UK Renault 4 gathering in Kent was a success, despite the terrible weather. I could not make the trip myself this year, but organizer Derek Flavell informs me that around sixteen 4s did attend. If anybody has photos or other items to contribute, please send them here. My own car is now stationed up at Derek's Renospeed garage in London, having some essential repair work done to get it through the next MOT. The general state of the car is not so bad and the underside is still sound, but various other bits of welding and electrical work need attention. My experience of getting the road tax renewed for another year, however, was a bureaucratic nightmare. With the MOT due to expire shortly before the tax, I took the car to have its test in advance at a local garage in Southwick, despite knowing for sure that it would fail, but so as to find out exactly what would need doing. It escaped my attention that when the garage handed back all my documents, including the MOT fail sheet, they did not return the original MOT certificate that proved it was still valid until the 21st June. Without this, I could not renew the tax. I tried to renew online, which should have been possible since my previous year's certificate was of the new electronically produced variety, but the procedure failed with a statement about being unable to locate a valid document. I returned to the MOT garage and requested a duplicate certificate, with just two days' validity remaining, but now all the Post Offices I visited refused to issue the tax, claiming that since the new tax would be running from July, the MOT had to cover part of July too, so there was 'nothing they could do' and I would have to obtain the MOT first. The problem was that I knew with Derek at Renospeed being so busy with other R4 projects, the car would need to be left at his garage for a few weeks in order for the work to be done, and I can't trust anybody else with the intricate welding work required to get it through the MOT, because only an experienced Renault 4 specialist knows how to properly perform the welding jobs on areas such as the rear chassis legs and mountings. For this work to be completed, the car would need to sit on a public road outside his garage, for which road tax is necessary to avoid the car being towed away and crushed. So I could not get the tax without the MOT, and could not get the MOT without the tax. I was stuck in a catch 22 situation. Upon telephoning the DVLA and attempting several times to wade through their diabolical, fully automated menu systems, I finally spoke to a lady who revealed that I could apply instead for the tax to run from June, not July. Technically, with the next expiry date being a month earlier, I would stand to lose a few quid in the deal but it offered a solution. She advised me to do this on their renewal hotline or via the Internet, but my attempts at both were met with further frustration in finding, after considerable wasted time, that these systems don't provide the option for this rather covert operation. I spoke to another DVLA advisor who was reluctant to admit that what the previous lady had told me was true, and indeed when I returned to the Post Office armed with this 'truth' from the original advisor, they were cagey about it but powerless to prevent me having the tax renewed from the previous month. So it would appear that it is some unwritten rule that neither the DVLA nor the Post Office want people to know about. Scanning all their literature in paper and on the web provides no mention of such a possibility. Finally, the matter is resolved, for now, and I hope to have the car back for the second half of the summer. Perhaps I'll even take it to Slovakia on the above trip! I have a Hungarian speaking colleague who would probably love to come along. In fact, this week she sent me an email containing two photographs of an R4 that she'd spotted in her home country of Bulgaria. She was so pleased to have spotted one (having travelled in my own in Britain many times over the previous year) and reckoned it to be possibly the only one in Sofia, or even Bulgaria. I had to spoil her surprise, by pointing out that it was the same Renault 4 I had already taken a photograph of when in the country on a work visit the previous year. What a small world we live in! You can find the picture at number MC168 in the Mystery Cars section of the gallery. |
| 23
April 2007 It's time to wish Renault 4-Play a happy birthday again, albeit a bit late because the day's almost over already. The 23rd April marks the anniversary of the site launch, and this year it reaches the lucky age of seven. How that luck might demonstrate itself I've no idea. The day is marked simply by some great new additions to the gallery in both the people's pics and star car sections, coming from an old friend of the site, Jorge Martín in Spain. Just as I celebrated the launch in 2000 sat up late at night with a cup of tea, I find myself again sipping a cuppa shortly before midnight, though this time it's of the Celestial Seasonings 'Sleepytime' variety. A long weekend of fiddling about upgrading somebody else's computer, and day after day spent at work designing a company Intranet system are taking their toll on my sanity. On the plus side, in turning my attentions to the latter of these activities over recent weeks, I've learnt a few more things about web design that were always rather hazy before, and I've stumbled across some great web editing software that I never previously knew existed. With this, any hope of overhauling this site becomes more feasible. Finally, news of two more upcoming R4 events: firstly, another run in Kent in conjunction with the Renault Owners Club of Great Britain (see links page). This one starts at the same place as last year - the services between junctions 4 and 5 on the M2 in north Kent. The run starts at 11am on Sunday 27th May, and finishes up at Hever Castle. Contact the club for more details. The second event is being held in France at Clermont-Ferrand, in a beautiful region of the country that I visited myself with my R4 in 2005 (see the 'my pics' page in the gallery, numbers MP29-MP32). It is billed as an 'International Gathering of the Renault 4', and takes place at the Circuits de Charade on the weekend of 25-26 August 2007. There will be many activities, both R4 and non-R4 related. For further details, click here for a PDF document containing an email link to the organiser. |
| 11
February 2007 A quick hello to the Polish Renault 4 owner driving through Brighton last weekend. Whilst stuck in a traffic jam near the Palace Pier (I refuse to name it by its new moniker of 'Brighton Pier', since this would suit its seeming ambition to be Brighton's one and only pier in a world free of fair competition, after the sorry and suspicious demise of the West Pier in a fire some years ago), I glanced to my right and was surprised to find a blue R4 with a travelling family on board in the outside lane. The car had a Polish number plate and so the occupants must have had a fair trek of more than a thousand miles across northern Europe to get here. Shortly afterwards I spotted another car, this time not a Renault 4, but with a Lithuanian number plate, as if to go one step further and outdo the R4. Perhaps they even knew each other. A few waves between the Renaults were all that could be achieved in the circumstances, so if you were the driver and you read this, send a hello and tell us your tales of travelling. This was the first Renault 4 I'd spotted in Britain for a very long time, excluding the ones seen during the Kent rally last May and a couple up at Derek's R4 garage. Probably at least two years have passed since my last spotting. One other small item to mention is the longest running and surely most boring poll ever conducted in the articles section. With a record low number of votes, I now declare the race to see which position is best for the front number plate of the R4 to be over. The award goes, by a narrow margin, to the bumper-mounted variant. The new poll asks, what is the most common reaction shown to your R4 by people in the street? |
| 7 January 2007 Well, here we go again. Another year, another few tens of thousands of Renault 4s will probably disappear off the roads, never to be seen again. A pretty sorry tale. I just spent two weeks on holiday in Japan, and didn't spot one R4 in any of my travels around the centre of the country, from Tokyo in the east to Osaka in the west, Kanazawa in the north to Toyohashi in the south. A few 4 fans from Japan have sent items to this site before, and my resident brother has seen a few over the years that he's been there, but there's nothing I can bring back in photographic form to present to you lot, sorry. What I did spot, however, were plenty of Nissan Cube and other similar squared-off box vehicles that are not seen on the roads in Europe and other parts of the world. Richard from the Renault 4 in Ireland website has previously cited this as being representative of a possible successor to the R4. Certainly, they are different to anything seen on the roads in Britain or the US. Additionally, the countless Suzuki Lapin vehicles inhabiting the streets of Japan are frequently fronted with alternative styling in the form of old-fashioned cars from the 50s and 60s. As has been seen in this history section previously, there is an Ancel Lapin Renault 4 styling kit available which turns this boxy vehicle into the closest copy of an R4 seen since Renault ceased the original's production in 1993. I didn't witness any of these, but as well as the Suzuki, a few other manufacturers have forayed into this retro market which appears to be extremely popular. Many cars have the looks and appeal of a curvy, chrome-fitted, cosy coupé of yesteryear, sometimes replete with some token fins or rear retro trim. Ultimately though, they are only imitations and can't match a real oldie like the R4 for its quirks and peculiarities. In case anybody didn't catch it originally, one famous broadcaster, BBC Top Gear's James May, wrote a short piece about la Quatrelle upon his return from France in summer 2006, and the article can be read here. |
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