Well, it's that time of year again when the cars are ready for a spring clean to start the show season. West Bromwich show was a big event this year as it is the 40th anniversary of the Interceptor, and the plan was to get as many Interceptors and Jensen cars to the show to celebrate this milestone in the cars home town.

JOC member Steve Johnson was the organiser of the show, and a cracking job he did as I tried to count the number of Interceptors there, but had to stop at 20 as I ran out of fingers and toes. Between the 3 Monday club members, we had enough digits to count 45, but we could be wrong and if anyone know the actual number, please let me know.

We decided that as we hadn't had a Monday Club day for a while, we would take a day off to give the cars a good clean and do a few odd jobs. It became the Friday Club as that was as close to the event as we could get, so we met at Miller Towers in Birmingham for a wash and a brush up.

Note the state of the wheels...

For once it was a beautiful day, and after hours of washing, and polishing the cars were starting to look good. You may notice that there are a lot of shots of my car. The reason for this is Chris Miller recently claimed that in 3 years he had never seen my car clean (and in fairness, both Zac Marshal and Alan Smith have previously said the same!), so Chris was made to take lot's of pictures to prove it can happen!

Due to the high cost of fuel in the UK, I have been reduced to piddling in the tank to top it up :0)

My wheels were in a shocking state, and we had to resort to a mild wheel cleaning acid to get the gunk off. It did a cracking job and reduced the amount of elbow grease no end.

Wheel after the acid based cleaner, but before polishing.

After 8 hours of cleaning I was ready to go home, only to find a pigeon had shat on the front of the car!

A Basil Fawlty moment after discovering pigeon droppings on 8 hours of polishing.

We had arranged to meet at the West Bromwich Albion football ground as it was an easy land mark for people to find who didn't know the area. Derek Chapman was in his beautiful CV-8 which was recently completed after a 6 year restoration.

Steve Payne had Dutch JOC members Han and Dicky Van Zelm as guests for the weekend, and they arrived in their very nice green MK2. The 5 of us headed off to the site of the old Jensen factory at Kelvin Way, which was about a mile down the road.

Steve Payne had, in motor bike terms, a "tank slapper" coming of an island, and he later admitted he was grateful for having brown, wipe clean leather upholstery...

The cars outside the old factory site.

Some of the other entrants to the show had stayed overnight at nearby Dudley, and had stopped off along the way at a couple of Jensen related sites in West Brom (I have taken the liberty of copying these shots from the JOC Forum site, and if I am infringing anyone's copyright please let me know).

Here are the cars lined up out side the Oak House in West Bromwich, which was used regularly in Jensen advertising pictures.

The cars lined up outside the old factory site.

The show quickly started to fill up, and before long 2 hugely impressive rows of Interceptors formed.

  

Just about every colour of car you can think of was there, from white to black, from orange to nuclear lime!

The older Jensen marques were also well represented, along with the Healey's and GT's.

We were getting peckish, so we went for a lunch of goat curry with rice and peas. They even threw in the bones for free.

Chris had been trying to persuade me for some time that I need to replace my modern reflective black on yellow number plates with the classic silver on black model. As there was a mobile number plate maker on site, I bunged him 20 quid, and job's a good 'un.

When people saw us tuning Derek Chapman's car, a queue formed for a tune up with the lambda sensor and timing light we had brought along with us. Here is Steve recoiling from the heat from an Interceptor engine. Chris Miller spent the day with what looked like half a sunburnt face, but he was basically roasted from the engine heat!

All in all a great day, and a nice result for Dutch JOC members Han and Dicky who won the award for the car that had travelled the furthest to be at the show!