Commander

Nice part of the world - me and the Mrs like to go for a walk up on the clumps when the weather's decent.

Yeah, just on the ladygrove... Bought a house here a year or so ago with the future-Mrs Commander. You? Car's much messier on the inside - stripped out track car.

Yeah, that's my e46, would have been on your right as you drove in. Wheels are a silky black coloured set of 18inch Team Dynamics Pro Race 1.2 wheels with MPS Cups... haven't caught them on any curbs yet either so they're still in good nick

Silverstone - Full GP Circuit :-)

I was parking my M3 outside Draycott Engineering ready for its MOT. It looked like you were heading down to the tyre place? V6 sounded lovely as you crawled by...

Anybody else coming on this?

MOT passed - picked up a couple of advisories but nothing I don't already know about.

In a nice black 70 Nismo in Didcot just now. Sounds good!

Any cougars that also enjoy good cars are good by me!

6-series too big and heavy - our road trips are more 'alpine b-road blast' than 'motorway waft'. porkers (for the money I can spend) scare me - too many horror stories. Also, I've driven a Boxster S in the past, I don't fit very well at all... far too cramped in the steering wheel / hand / knee / door card area when turning. Roof is also quite close to my head :-/

Where's all the women?

I've never driver either, though obviously do have a 350HR and an e46 M3 which are both fairly close comparisons in the grand scheme of things. I think I agree with all of this though. Can you have too many S54s in your life? The M3 is brilliant, but it's hardly a friendly place to be these days - track days only. A nice little Z4MC would, i hope, be great on euro road trips and probably won't lose much / any money while I keep it for a few years as a daily. The Mrs can be the one with the practical car Not entirely sure you can get a decent one for the money I plan on having? Also don't really want to get in to modding it - slippery slope!

Budget of around £18k so no need to bring Nismo in to it. Which is the better car and why? (I don't care about boot space or MPG. More interest in performance, feel, handling, looks, etc)

*facepalm* You got to those kinds of weights and nobody picked you up on use of your thumbs? Worrying! People have died of less I'm sure.

^^ Why no diagnosis? I damaged my MCL and posterior medial meniscus in an accident at the start of the year. The support and exercises the Physio had me doing helped massively. I'm now a big believer in going to see the professionals!

Well she may be broken in body and spirit, but she's still bossing me around so can't be all bad If you want to get some idea of what happened, do a search on Google / YouTube for 'rotational fall'. Thanks again for the kind words. No idea if anybody on here works for the NHS or Ambulance service, but they did a cracking job. Even ended up chatting with her Doctor, a South African lady of about 45, and how she nearly bought a 350HR some years ago but went for a 370 instead - I couldn't believe my ears! Big thanks to the NHS, the Ambulance Service, various friends who ferried us around yesterday and the staff at the riding school. Rich.

Thanks for the kind words. Just got home after several ultra-sounds, xray and CT scans - nothing broken and no organs damaged... Just REALLY sore and struggling to even stand up, let alone walk. Watching your lady fall off a horse is bad enough, watching the horse forward-roll over her afterwards isn't brilliant! I was on a horse too at the time - never jumped off one so quickly in my life!

Stuck in a waiting room - fiancée fell off a horse which then forward-roled on top of her. She had all the gear on but possible pelvis damage. Ambulance service were brilliant. I hate not being able to do anything, just stuck here on my own :-(

The trim on the door doesn't extend forward on to the wing?

Since Thruxton, my tax ran out so I've had it SORN'd while I get round to sorting the MOT - hopefully get that done this week. I'm a bit nervous about it - I've never tried to MOT a track day car before so I just hope they don't fail it on some technicality I've overlooked. MOT aside, next up is Silverstone on Monday 16th November. I'll be there in the M along with my brother in his e36 m3 and a mate on his first track day ever in an RX7 (with freshly re-built engine, lol)

Thruxton I went on a fairly rare day at Thruxton a little while ago now but didn't get round to writing about it. As usual before a track day I took the car out for a few b-road blasts just to check everything was ok - and it was I woke up at the crack of dawn on the big day, fired the car up and it sounded like a dog! After some laptop-based diagnostics I established a misfire on Cylinder 4. To work out if the problem was spark plug or coil pack I swapped the pack over with Cylinder 3 to see if the problem moved with it... it did. A quick trip up to my local Euro Car Parts in Abingdon and some money later I had the car back up and running, but obviously now running pretty late! The TDO was great about me being late and they got me briefed up just in time for me to be the last car on the last set of sighting laps... talk about cutting it close! I'd never been to Thruxton before, didn't even look at the track layout or watch any YouTube videos - pretty well just rocked up not knowing what to expect. What a track! The up/down undulation is huge over the course of the circuit and there are no straights anywhere - it's corner, corner, corner, corner, corner - screw one up and it punishes you for aaages! Just brilliant... nice and wide, fair amount of run off for most of it, and extremely technical. I think I did about 60 laps over the whole day and I can safely say I didn't do a single perfect lap... not even close! Coilpack problems aside, the car was good. The 6-pot PBMW / RS-29 / RBF600 brake setup continues to be beastly, even on 265 Cups. The engine oil & coolant temps both remained spot on since removing the air con and refreshing the coolant. I (the Driver) continue to be the limiting factor in the car, with 'slower' cars absolutely destroying me in/out of Church corner. I only had one real brown-pants moment when the rear went at full throttle through Village - I caught it before anything serious happened but it scared the fork out of me and took a good while for me to build my speed back up to the same pace through that corner.

Not often you hear about car-to-car contact on a track day... any idea what happened? Must have been quite a bang to shatter glass.

PlusNet is owned by BT

Home BT lines should get the same service from Openreach as any other ISP does. None of the providers you mention are going to provide you with a faster service because it's the same copper wire they use (assuming you keep paying like for like ofc), so it's just piece of mind and customer service you're paying for really. You'd be better off changing your bank - makes any account numbers / sort codes they've stolen useless and some banks will pay you ~£100 just for joining.