Born to be fast, loud and on the move

This story was originally published on rantrave.com in 2010 

            Laszlo Zappador was born in a car. Not in a car park, not at the roadside, but in the back seat of a rattling Fiat 126 that was racing at 80 miles per hour from Gyor to Budapest. It was the 19st of May 1989 and Laszlo's mother, who was 17 at the time and single, was hitchhiking to the capital of Hungary when her labour suddenly sped up. It was a kick start that would determine the rest of his life.

            "I think about my mother a lot," says Laszlo, "especially on days like today. I'm turning 21 today and I hope she would have been proud of me. I've got my driving licence, have owned 8 cars in total, have lived in four different countries and I'm still a virgin. I really try to live my life in her honour and make her dreams come true because she didn't have enough time to do so. Don't you think it's sad she never went abroad, not even on a holiday? She hated Hungary, hated it so much... yet she never got to see another country."

            When I ask Laszlo how she died, he picks up a star spanner from the floor and starts polishing off the grease with his t-shirt. For a whole minute, the workshop is quiet except for the sounds of running engines in the back.

            "Nobody knows what really happened," he finally says. "I was six at the time, and all I remember is that one afternoon, she didn't come to pick me up from school. She'd run away from her family when she was expecting me, so at first, I was afraid she was running away from me too. Because she didn't have very honourable jobs in Budapest, she never introduced me to any of her friends either. There was no one I could ring, no one I could go to, so my teacher took me home with him. The next day he found out from the police that she had been ran over by a car with no licence plates. That was the first time I decided to go abroad. I didn't even have a passport; can you imagine what I was up against?"

            He puts the now shiny star spanner in a toolbox and runs his fingers through his greasy hair. "The struggle never ends. Even for an experienced driver like me, it's hard to find cheap car insurance because I'm young and a foreigner. But when I was 14 years old, I had won the national go-kart championship twice and was noticed by a coach. He helped me move to Germany, where I learned to drive on real racing tracks."

            "I was very good. Experts started to compare me to Kimi Raikkonen. But in 2007, I fell ill. Depression, emotional blockage, that sort of thing. I'd never dealt with my mother's disappearance, hadn't even been to her funeral. And all of a sudden, I started dreaming I was driving the car that hit her. I couldn't get in a car anymore without breaking into a sweat. I thought I needed a change of scenery, so I moved to Amsterdam. I joined a community of artists living in a large squat, but soon started to miss cars. Especially the sound of the engine and the wheels on the tarmac. I didn't have my licence yet, so I wasn't allowed to drive outside official tracks but I bought my first car there, anyway. A red Nissan Sunny from 1994."

            "Inspired by the people that surrounded me, I started to see the car as a piece of art. Not a very nice one – she was decrepit and rusty – but she had potential. The first thing I did was replace her wheels with massive, round speakers. I put several microphones in and around the engine, the exhaust, the emergency break and the gearstick. I connected all of these to a switchboard with separate volume control switches and voila: my first sound machine. I performed at several squat parties and sold the Sunny Sound for € 6500, more than six times as much as I paid for it."

            His pale complexion lights up when he shows me the pictures of his first car. "I believe the Dutch lad that bought her still gives the occasional concert. Someone sent me a bootleg recording the other day. Bloody amazing. But Holland was too small for me, and I couldn't get the hang of that silly language. So I spent my money on a ticket and flew to England. I've just managed to sell the Roaring Rover for £60,000 and am now working on a Clamourous Cadillac."

Road Trip!

I'm signing up for the Great British Banger Challenge...

...and I'm not giving up my vegetarian lifestyle! I enjoyed driving a van so much, that I'm seriously contemplating buying a car! And this facebook group is probably going to be the deciding factor.

So what's this Great British Banger Challenge about? If you enter the Challenge, you need to buy a car for less than £250 (I couldn't even afford a more expensive one if I wanted to), drag it home, fix it, decorate it, make sure it has valid tax, MOT and car insurance, and take it around Britain in 5 days. They say it's not a race – the challenge is to get there at all. Entry fee is £165, which will be used to arrange camping and the rest will be donated to charity (though it doesn't say what charity...)

The route will be:

Day 1 Cardiff to Carlisle
Day 2 Carlisle to Scarborough via Edingburgh
Day 3 Scarborough to SouthEnd-on-Sea
Day 4 SouthEnd-on-Sea to Weymouth (avoiding London)
Day 5 Weymouth to Cardiff

My budget for this hobby isn't particularly big, so I'll have to compare car insurance quotes to find the cheapest policy on the market. I might even have to exchange my Dutch drivers licence for a British one since having a foreign licence pushes up the quotes dramatically. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether my 4 years of experience will still be acknowledged if I switch. It wouldn't be very nice if I 'lost' those. Especially not if I can't 'get them back' if I change back to the Dutch licence again in the future! Anyone got experience with this?



(It took a while before I understood the song is about sat navs, haha, but isn't it a fantastic singalong? Got to love the Lancashire Hotpots!)

My first time in a British van

So, I've had my drivers licence since December 2006 and I moved to the UK in September 2008, but until I moved to Cardiff (August 2010), I'd never driven a car on the left side of the road. (Except for that one time I went back to Holland for a couple of days and ended up facing the back of the traffic lights, but I'd rather not talk about that.)

Last time Freddie and I moved (from our lovely mansion in Uxbridge to the House of Horrors in Harrow) we hired a man with a van. This time, we decided not to bring the wardrobe, bed, cooker and all those other big pieces of furniture; a mate helped us get the motorbike and a chest of drawers full of undies, socks and shirts up here; but we still needed to rent a van for the rest of our clothing, bicycles, duvet, Freddie's weights, cookery stuff, tomato and pepper seedlings... you get the gist.

I decided to rent an old Ford Transit for the weekend via selfdrivevanhirelondon.co.uk because it was the cheapest option. Their insurance, however, was shit – basically I would have to pay for any damage under £700 and I couldn't get any extra cover. Don't get me wrong – I'm not an irresponsible driver and I respect the road, but I'd never driven in Britain before, and I'm used to small cars like my mum's Peugeot 206cc – not vans with the steering wheel at the right side of the car! So I was bricking it just thinking of driving without any useful insurance.

Several sleepless hours later, I gave my credit card details to insuremyvanhire.com, an innovative website that sells full AXA Car Insurance cover for the duration of your car rental. I was happy as Larry with this find - and still am, even though I didn't add a scratch to the ramshackle old Transit, because it made me feel so much more confident.

I found staying on the left side of the road the easiest thing in the world (of course I did have lots of practice on my bicycle). Still, Freddie said the first twenty minutes were possibly the most frightening moments of his life. I blame this on the gear stick, which was knackered and made it virtually impossible to shift gears fluently. Also, I kept asking him to look out of the left window and tell me whether I was getting too close to the curb/cars/cyclists, which must have given him the impression I had no idea what I was doing. Though I didn't commit any serious offences, I certainly upset a lot of other drivers by not being quick enough. But after I left Central London, I was starting to get the hang of it and I soon didn't even have to mouth apologies at other drivers any more! We left London Saturday night at midnight and because I had to hand in the van on Monday morning, I decided to leave the house in Cardiff at 4 am Monday morning - about a day after we arrived.

The drive home as much fun - radio on full blast, pedal to the metal and a bottle of Boost on my lap - as getting stuck in traffic round the corner from the rental company was aggravating. I think I spent more time in the city than on the M4! What made it even worse was that I thought I had to pay for congestion charge before entering the zone, which made me leave the motorway prematurely. This time, I fully understood why drivers had been shouting at me when I was driving too slowly or making it impossible for them to overtake earlier. I have to admit I was quite tempted to make some impolite gestures at clumsy drivers myself. But if they're not doing it on purpose, what's the point in making them feel bad? Road rage will only increase your own stress levels, and it's not like it's going to make you get to your destination any quicker. So instead of shouting at other drivers, I sang along with Metallica and the Offspring to let off steam and behaved like a decent driver. Hell, I even wore a seatbelt at all times – unlike this dude Kevin, who appeared on Cab Cam, a campaign against road rage.

You may have noticed this is a Sponsored Post. Since I quit my full time job in order to write my second novel, I'm happy to make some extra money with my blog. That doesn't mean I've lost my integrity or autonomy, though. I'll choose my sponsors carefully. I was planning to write about my first experience with driving in Britain anyway and I did take out that AXA van insurance. And I do think AXA Respect On The Road campaign is worth a like on Facebook – because it's funny and it shows what a silly thing road rage is: