Filming Bugattis With Bugattis, Banned Adverts and Meeting Legends

0:00 Introduction and Welcome

You've had three adverts banned.

Yes.

Sometimes the feedback is extremely welcomed.

And then sometimes you're just like,

just stop talking.

You're just talking to talk.

Shout out to all my customers.

And you've worked with a lot of sort of big

stars and big cars, but has there ever been a

pinch yourself, like the standout pinch

yourself moment or person or car?

One was at the biggest surprise,

which was...

Hello, and welcome back to the Cars Rule

Everything Around Me podcast,

not episode 72, like you might think.

This is now a bonus episode.

Episodes with guests will now be coming at

you on a Tuesday on top of your normal Thursday creaming.

This week, if you're an audio listener,

we have Al Clark with us.

I'm going to do the thing that is,

you know, every bad podcast does.

Can you introduce yourself, please,

and give us a very quick rundown of who you

are, what you do?

Absolutely.

My name's Al Clark.

I'm a film director by Trey.

lead, a bit of a driver as a side hobby,

and a bit of a sort of a side quest for work

sometimes as well.

I pretty much spend all my working life

around cars going quickly.

That's my job.

I think it's a pretty good intro.

I wish I

could say that's the same thing.

I think we're just low-rent YouTubers.

We're having a while.

Going quickly is the...

Are we not really doing that?

No.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of my jobs become

an office-based job, which is also rubbish,

but we can know about that at the time.

Well, I mean, you say that, but at the same

time, we're surrounded by some of your personal cars.

You've got quite a good collection,

which we'll get into later.

But at the beginning of all every Cars Rule

Everything Around Me

podcast, we answer the question,

do cars rule or ruin

everything around you this week?

Have they been good or bad?

Always been good this week.

Yeah.

Wasn't it?

Well, I've

just come back from Finland drifting for,

you know, the best time on public road.

No.

Oh, sorry.

My lawyers have always been up to finish that sentence.

No, we just got back from Finland.

We spent a week out there with some friends

in old rear wheel drive, Japanese cars and

M3s and stuff, just on like private proving

ground, snow drifting roads,

just blasting around for an entire week.

And that is, you've got one chaser behind you here.

So that is a mark two, not the chaser technique.

Wow.

I'm actually not.

I've been done quite badly.

Everyone makes the same, everyone makes the

same initial mistake.

And the problem is, when you say I've got a

mark two, they're like a mark two chaser,

and you like know it.

It's just actually called a mark two.

So that's, that's fun.

So you've got two of those.

And that's a two J car, they're one that I

took, Jack the Finland's a one J car.

So that's good fun.

And that was like perfect.

It was just like, it's 300 horsepower a diff.

Yeah.

That's it.

As Japan promised,

that's all you need.

Yeah.

Just the, the baseline, you know,

all Americans out here doing like 900

horsepower going, yeah, no, that's it.

That's, that's what you need.

It is just around around.

That does have 900 horsepower.

Okay.

But, you know, I haven't had a good chance to

try that properly yet.

So that's, that's...

Well, you know, after the podcast wraps,

you know, we'll head on down the road.

We should have a quick go, you know?

Perfect pub car, frankly.

Four dolls, exactly, exactly what it's

3:11 Al's Career Journey from Track Days to Car Filming

built for.

We have a litany of questions to get through.

Obviously your, your professional life is

around the filming of automotive,

well, in automotive filming,

but then your personal life,

you have these cars.

Do you want to start or fly with my questions?

This is going to be an interrogation or anything.

You start the interrogation and I'll chip in.

Right.

I'll lock in.

First things first, can you explain how

everything started from renting out track

take cameras to where you are now?

Yeah.

So I, I'd exited the music industry,

the horrible place that I don't want to be,

didn't want to be part of anymore.

It started off really good.

And then you realize that it's just,

just disastrous for everyone.

I think it's got worse.

And then I tried some other bits and pieces,

which are very strange.

And I ended up with a friend starting a track

day business.

And this was in the like early days of the

track day business when it was still not a

lot of TDO's operating and we started a

little Mazdron track.

The idea being that MX-5s were just becoming popular.

Right.

What sort of year was this?

Oh my goodness.

It would be 2000 and sort of.

Wow.

Okay.

So yeah, definitely early days.

Yeah.

So really early days.

The company's still running under,

under Nick and someone else at the moment.

But the, it was, it was kind of based off the

back of the owner's club that I joined when I

bought an MX-5.

And they were a bit of a, sort of a group of polishes.

And we were like, why are you not using this awesome car?

And everyone's going like, "I can't use that in madness."

Yeah.

So MX-5 people.

MX-5 people.

Yeah.

And we decided to sort of like buck the trend

and actually, you know, on the back of a

small little event, we sort of test drove.

We thought like, actually, people do want to

use these cars.

And they're brilliant for it,

as you know, you know, even now they're still

reliable, fast, reasonably cheap.

And they're, they were perfect.

So we, we had that running.

On the side of that, I quite fancied,

you know, it was a sort of a semi,

attempt to do something that I actually

wanted to do that was creative to.

And I'd been given a small amount of money

from inheritance, you know, just a couple of

thousand pounds that I put towards buying

these little bits of equipment,

which at the time, GoPro's didn't really exist.

Yeah.

The idea was that I could rent these little

cameras out, pop them in people's cars,

burn them to a DVD, and then there you go.

And that was your sort of track day footage.

And that was kind of the only way that people

were getting track day footage.

And that was the theory in the plan.

I bought a second camera.

And the second camera was designed for a bit

of B-roll, so I could shoot cars from the

outside because I thought actually people

would quite like to see their cars being

driven past as well.

And you could just put the clips onto the DVD

as well, and that was great and all happy.

And then a racing driver asked me,

he said, "Oh, would you be interested in

doing like a little promo film for me?"

And I shot that and then I started filming

some drifting, I started filming some other

bits and pieces, and eventually to a contact

at the Nürburgring where I spent pretty much

most of my summers I went to,

they said, "Did you want to come and shoot a

video for Car Magazine?"

When Car Magazine was just

starting to do their first online videos.

Okay.

And this

was in the days when people were still not

sure if YouTube

was the platform for them.

Yeah.

People thought like, "I want Vimeo."

They were going for their own websites as well.

And I remember that was the kind of the idea

of like, "Oh, are we putting this on YouTube?"

No, we were going to try and put it on like

Car Magazine.com or what it was.

But yeah, the first sort of page I did for

them was the Bugatti Veyron Grandsport.

I'm filming MX5 the next week.

It was

quite the jump.

And I still kind of like think,

I don't

know how that kind of all, but it was such a

cool start and

it was such a chaotic, hectic time.

But it was really,

really was that inception of trying to film

like a car review.

Especially in the background,

of them having to sort of shoot like a 10

page spread, because the car was such a

seminal thing at the time.

So the magazine was, they needed photos,

but we still had the limited amount of time

and you think like, how quick you want to

make a film for a car, you have like the

photography trying to do like a huge amount of spread.

Big reach out the way.

Yeah, exactly.

So I was fully in the way and trying to make

something like was vaguely cinematic.

And we sort of, you know, butted heads a

little bit about priorities and yeah,

but we both got the job done and we managed

to produce the film.

And that sort of snowball into another one,

which then snowballed into being asked by an

old magazine, edited, if you who ran an

agency said, would you like to come and make

an advert for Jaguar?

And when we turned up on the shoot,

the track owner was expecting a panelock

slurry to turn up the whole family.

And they were like, okay, cool.

So where is everyone?

Where's your team?

Hello.

It's just me.

with my two little cameras and a smoke machine.

And that was it.

But then that snowball, because you did some

of the Jaguar villain commercials,

right?

We did little bits of helping out on those.

Yeah.

So the main campaigns, there was lots of

little sort of subsidiary content right around that.

So I ended up shooting a lot of sort of stuff

that went in as like hand inserts or like car

drive-bys and bits

8:26 Filming the Supra Commercial for Volkswagen

and pieces for like the wider campaign.

Right.

So it didn't end up doing the sort of the

main directing on that.

That was a wonderful man called Piggy Lines,

who's, I think he was just, it was just the

best idea ever.

So I was sort of like, yeah,

loosely based around that.

It's really good fun.

I had did some shoots with that.

There was a lot of, that was a time when

Jaguar really knew who they were.

And all the content they were producing for

two years was built around that,

that whole premise.

So all the cars, you know, were just shot in

like cool gangster locations.

It just looked, it looked how Jaguar's like

are reflected to car people.

Yeah, it is a bad East car.

It's what they're for.

And it was, it was, it was, it still feels

bad to me that they lost such a strong

identity that no one else was really picking off.

And so you just got to go and just shoot the

cars looking as cool as possible.

Yeah.

And everything that sort of came out was

built off that theory.

So it was, yeah, good time.

So we touched on it there, but your,

your kind of bread and butter now is for OEMs

doing commercials.

Do you call them commercials?

What do you call them?

I think commercial is probably the simplest

framing for them.

It's not for Kia.

It's not for, well, no, but you don't go for

them, but you're doing the big boys.

Yes.

Because I think we're very lucky in the UK

that essentially all of our manufacturers are

things like, you know, McLaren,

Bentley, Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover.

So we've got like quite a good selection here.

And then we're very close to,

you know, your Porsche, your Bugatti's,

your Ferraris and stuff as well.

So all of those are just kind of,

we know within like a thousand miles of here,

which is kind of crazy when you think about it.

And you've said the word, I know it's the

thing that you get asked the most,

but you were, well, you were essentially the

person in charge of that share on commercial.

That's right.

And you do a quick explanation of what that

commercial was.

Absolutely.

People are going to recognize it the moment

you explain it.

And also how stock was the Supra that you used?

Yeah.

So the idea came around, the whole,

the whole film sort of came off at the back

of an idea that when I was, it was,

I used to go and shoot launches as well when

I was kind of just sort of trying to shoot

and earn and do as much shooting as I possibly could.

I was doing the Sheeran launch as a bit of a

favor, kind of long after I'd sort of stopped doing them.

But I was like, actually, this is quite a

good car to go and hang around with for a week.

And then we were heading back from the

countryside into Lisbon.

And there were two of us, two cars sort of

running alongside each other.

Andy Wallace, you know, fantastic.

Amazing.

Yeah.

Winner, you know, next to me.

And then another driver on the left.

And we were just driving all these cars back.

And I was just looking out the window,

just casually just sat out the passenger

window, as we were sort of, you know,

speeds were.

Speeds were speeds.

One of the speeds of all time.

And we carried on.

And I was just looking at it,

I was thinking like, this would be really

cool to try and film this, like properly.

Like, how do we do this?

And we started talking about like,

do we go and do this on like Sunday morning,

just before, you know, church opens.

And we thought, we'll try it.

And then we thought we won't try it,

because that's really silly idea,

because we've attracted so much police

attention around this.

And that it was impossible to move without anything.

So we're like, right, okay, where can we do this?

Fortunately,

Volkswagen had this in perfect test track,

which a lot of people will know,

Aerosend, which is this physically flat track

that not just a flat road, but it is a flat

level track that cuts through the earth.

It is that flat, so that it's completely

flat, like true level.

And it is the most like outrageously long

straight that you can just barrel around this

bank corner and then crack on.

And we didn't need that.

The car just needed to do zero to 400

kilometers an hour to zero again to beat some

arbitrary record that they had invented.

And what we decided was we were going to do

that and attach the camera to do the big main shot.

It's like the whole film was built around.

It's one singular shot of the car launching,

reaching its top speed and overtaking,

basically.

And we attached the camera to the back of

another car, did the shot, got up to 400

kilometers an hour.

The other show and actually carried on past

us and went well past like 4.30,

4.40 or something like that,

as we were blown off the road.

And then we parked up, added some other shots

in, made the film, put it out and the internet exploded.

Is that still the most viewed?

Yes, it is.

The car video.

It is the most, it is, yeah,

it's the most, I guess, not even organically,

it is organic, but it was the most most

viewed car commercial that is on YouTube

completely, with the exception of the Jean

Claude Bandham truck commercial.

Right, yeah.

Which is not technically listed under cars

and vehicles, so.

(laughing)

And so it's very normal, I don't know.

I wanna say.

(laughing)

Because I can't take them away,

'cause that was an amazing commercial as well.

Yeah, it's not.

Because we would have been at car,

sort of, I think.

I remember it because I think,

'cause it ended up being kind of a press

thing, I think.

Yeah.

Cartha or obviously shared it when we were

doing it, just being, 'cause it was

Koenigsegg who came out not long afterwards

and said that they just did the same thing or

beat it by however much.

It was still the Bugatti one that people are

gonna remember.

The Bugatti one is, yeah.

That's exactly what I was gonna say is that

even though Koenigsegg beat it,

they didn't have that cinematic look of what

the Bugatti did.

So therefore, that was just a news article

that came up that went, "Oh,

Koenigsegg's beat it."

I went, "Cool, I'll go with my day."

I don't remember that Koenigsegg one,

though.

I can see the shot of them both launching at

the same time.

Yeah, and Koenigsegg one didn't have the mean

attached to it.

No, exactly.

Was it just a stock suit for it?

Yeah.

I just love the fact that that came out of it

because that kind of, aside from the fact

that you had people always questioning what

it was, no one figured it out.

It's the most obvious option.

Hundreds of thousands of comments and not one

of them seemed to just go, "Might,

they have had another one."

Yeah.

There's only one cheering on.

Yeah.

And we actually had three on the shoot,

which was a bit bougie, but one of them was

just for sad.

One of them was just like there for doing the

car to car shot and the other one was the

sort of the hero car.

And in fact, it was quite helpful having them

because it actually rained on the morning of

the second day when we really needed it not to.

So we just sent out all these sirens doing

high-speed runs, constantly just lifting the

water off the ground.

It was an amazing sight.

What a great job for the morning,

mate.

I need you to just go out and do a couple of

200-mile-hour runs if you can,

just put it, get off the water.

And they do.

Do I have to really drive the camera car?

And the test drivers.

Oh, it wasn't a driver, because it was Montoya.

Yeah, so Grand Pablo Montoya,

which, this is, I mean, there are endless

cool facts about these cars,

but when we were in the planning stage for

the shoot, we said, well, we have to be in

like a helmet, and a race suit,

and a racing seat, and they're like,

why?

And I said, oh, because he's going really

fast and stuff, and they were like,

it's designed to do it.

Yeah, it's a car.

It's not race car.

Well, well within operate.

You don't even need the second key to do what

we're doing.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd be quite concerned.

Yeah.

If I ever get on a full fight,

I'd be like, well, now what we up to today?

It's actually dangerous.

And that's the thing that kind of the

engineering overtakes a lot of other things.

There are loads, I mean, you get Honda Civics

that can go faster than a Shiron.

Yeah.

Like they exist, it's fine.

We can all imagine what those silks are,

you know, dragsters can leave them,

make them look stupid.

But the point is, is you're getting your big,

out of Shiron, and it will do all of that

constantly forever.

Yeah.

And it just needs servicing.

Yeah.

And that's the whole point about them.

They're not, they're not stressed,

they are, and I'm not trying to just blow

smoke up the getty here, just for sake of it,

but they are, you know, anyone who's actually

been out in one will tell you,

they're just like a Turbo S.

S, S, S, S, S, S.

Right, yeah, yeah.

They're just phenomenally normal.

Yeah.

Well, you know, when Cream buys one,

when we get a company car, we always test that out.

It is one of those cars that is,

it's a halo, it would, it's just a Veyron,

a Shiron will do, but a Veyron's like the

one, it's the top four car.

It was like that con core, where it was that

unobtainium, you never saw one,

it was the, yeah, the top gear thing,

so it would absolutely love to,

I'd even like to be a passenger in one.

Yeah, so, passenger experience is just as

helmet on, yeah, in my suit.

Well, as I say, once they hit that sub 30

grand, when they appreciate it now.

It's gonna happen.

We'll take you in five years,

I think.

Yeah.

Now, gonna go back ever so slightly,

ever so slightly, but you said that you did a

few jobs before, you started getting into the

car stuff, but one of those was trainings

with a fighter pilot.

That's right.

I know this is a car podcast,

but they're interested me when I had that,

'cause I was like, what happened there?

'Cause it was a weird like technicality,

which meant that you couldn't become a fighter pilot.

That's correct.

What happened with that?

So, went to

17:17 Fighter Pilot Training and MX-5 Beginnings

join.

So, it was actually a friend of mine,

he was a commercial pilot, and he said,

would you consider it?

And I was like, yeah, actually,

that's quite cool.

Yeah, you know what?

Yeah, but I didn't wanna play commercial.

I was sitting in a tube in the sky for my life.

So, I was like, actually, that would be pretty cool.

So, I went to do an interview,

and they said, yeah, you sound like you're

sort of semi-competent enough at this stage.

And then you go to Cromwell,

and you do all the aptitude tests,

you do the little, they give you a load of

computer games that you do, they burn your

eyes with a bright light to make sure that

you look at the sun for a not long enough,

and also, which I barely scraped through.

I think I was 0.1 seconds of being able to

like, actually hold my eyes open,

because you don't want to shut your eyes

whilst you're looking at the sun.

And then a few other bits of pieces were

like, yeah, it's all good.

And then go through all of this eight months

of process, when you actually get to the

point where you get inducted.

And at the very last second,

you sort of end up with this final little

chat that you do, it was like a,

a bit like a personality check.

I think, you know, they, they ask you just

some, just some normal questions to make sure

you're kind of like a normal person and,

or not, depending on what they're looking for.

And I was too old by 19 days or something.

No

way.

So they thought I was a year younger than it was.

Oh,

please, you never actually got to fly.

Never got to touch

it.

It was all training.

It was all just because they do

seven years of training.

Yeah.

And they spend umpteen millions doing it.

And there is a very, very strict cut off.

And they were like, this is just crazy.

So like the problem is, it's like,

it didn't feel like anything.

It was like, 19 days.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it feels like it's

kind of like you could probably go,

no, I think it'll be fine.

They shouldn't make a difference.

How did you feel two and a bit weeks ago?

Yeah.

No, I felt better than that.

Yeah.

I kind of, I mean, you know,

my, my cousin, sorry, family friend cousin,

but essentially cousin, uh, he is a Chinette

captain and he, he wrote to,

wrote to them and said, you know,

like, this is, this is mad.

That's like, we just put for pilots and they

went, and they just went, we have to have a cutter.

Yeah, and rules are rules.

Yeah.

Like, what about the guy who's only 16 days?

Yeah.

He goes only one day past, like,

there have to be a point somewhere.

Yeah, of course.

And for, it was just unfortunate.

So my mother was very relieved.

Yeah.

Then you went, Oh, I'm going to go and film

up a gatydoon before I come out.

Not again.

I just need something dangerous.

Yeah.

Um, but it was, it was nice to kind of,

um, have that sort of a very,

kind of like

immediate stop because I was like,

all right, well, shit, I actually,

what am I actually going to do now?

Yeah.

You know, what is actually the plan?

And I ended up just, again, that was sort of

based on the wanting to start my own

business, do something creative again,

because I had the whole creative side.

Like, also what a generational downfall from

Fight of Pilots, a Fight of Pilots to MX-5.

You know, the Bugatti's fine.

You're back up on that level,

but to look at an MX-5 and go,

that's where I'm at.

I'm like, not quite as fast then.

Yeah.

I can't do that.

Is it at least a 1.8?

Yeah.

And it was, it was, you know,

you know, it was a life that,

it's a life that wasn't to be.

And I'm, you know, it's allegedly,

you know, it would have been quite a lonely

life as well.

You're kind of like, it's not traveling the

world in quite the way that I think people

can expect it.

No, exactly.

It's not just Top Gun all the time.

Unfortunately, not, that's not what I hear.

But, you know, at the same time,

I don't worry about it.

I'm so happy doing, yeah, we're.

I mean, yeah, we're sitting in a unit full of

very cool cars.

It's not, yeah, it's still pretty,

it's pretty cool.

Also, I like something you said on,

this is more to do with the sort of the work

you're doing now.

But where you said that the car poster's not

really a thing anymore, people blue tacking stuff too.

But that's what media is and videos and even

photos on Instagram and whatever to an

extent, I've never made that kind of connection.

Because I think we would have both had some

posters, but we would have grown up seeing a

clip on YouTube.

So what replaced a poster for us was someone

21:24 The Shift from Car Posters to Video Content

driving a mercy logo at top speed on a

motorway is that that's why I want that car.

Rather than having it.

the thing stuck on the wall.

So I caught like that.

Obviously, that had some influence on you.

Absolutely.

Make content you want to make.

That whole thing, that whole sort of change

from, you know, the magazine industry is

dying whilst the new industry sort of

suddenly picks up.

And then all of a sudden you've got this,

you know, again, I don't think people have

posters on their walls at all that they used to.

I mean, I don't think the magazines even come

with, they don't even have pages to come with a poster.

They have a wall paper on a phone.

They have a wall paper on the phone.

But also, you know, those iconic,

I always remember they're like,

I had an iconic, it was a Diablo,

SP, yellow, and it was in as like a black studio.

And it had just this kind of like orange light.

But I

remember that the poster very,

very specifically, I kind of know where it was from.

I think it was like, you know,

it could have been a car magazine of some sort.

But I remember thinking like that's the

coolest thing I've ever seen.

And it just, it was there.

And now you can, with the power of video,

you can create more iconic moments on top of that.

Yeah, that make you feel it,

because I always think that that when you

look at a photo, you kind of feel like

yearning towards that car.

You think, "Oh, maybe one day I'll get that car."

But when you see a video, you can almost put

yourself in the driver's seat.

You're like, "I'm doing this.

This is the coolest thing in the world."

And, you know, the fact is, is that now you

can hear the engine, and you can see the

physical speed, and you can kind of see

different angles of the car.

And you can also see it in places that

perhaps you didn't quite expect.

You know, the gloves truly are off now in

terms of like where and what you can do with stuff.

People are putting their car through crazier

places to kind of do more extreme things with

them, to kind of maybe raising the bar as the

wrong word, but to kind of keep something

fresh and interesting and new without trying

to sort of break laws, which are getting

everyone's, you know, everyone's more strict.

And as we go, you know, car adverts haven't been good.

I'm going to use the word for quite a long time.

Like, I can't remember.

I mean, you look at the old '80s and '90s

stuff of like Peugeot.

literally dropping out of a plane.

Yeah.

You know, handbraked turning.

When was the last time you saw a handbraked turn?

Yeah.

And that used to be a staple of the hatchback

adverts and where's that gone now?

That was one of the...

So I heard in Sam Wars' podcast,

you said you've had three

adverts banned.

Yes.

What were they?

So Jaguar XFR.

XFRs.

Yeah.

And we, yeah, we were drifting in

Switzerland, driver film, Morrison did a good

old, scared in it.

And ironically, that wasn't the bit that got it banned.

It was crossing a white line,

crossing a fixed, standard solid white line.

And you said, so now you imposed removal of

the white line, so they can't say anything?

Yeah.

It's just a wide road officer.

It's a big, wide road.

Yeah, big, wide closed road.

Don't worry about the sign over there.

That's not road sign.

Now the interpret speed is racing or

encouraging fast driving, so it's really,

really difficult now.

Basically, it's all down to who complains

about it, how much an interpretation.

The second one was a joint effort with

Petroleum, which I just was,

you know, kind of helping out and part of the

filming crew, which was recreating Outrun

with the convertible Testerossa.

Sotheby's?

What was that different for M?

Yeah.

And that got pulled because they were saying

the girl doing the classic, we know when you

do a drift in Outrun, the girls.

And that's what they didn't like.

They were like, oh, she's, uh,

that's dangerous.

And we were like, but that's,

it's so clearly fantasy.

Yeah.

It was so clearly in like a fantastical world

of like 80s cars, you know, shooting through,

you know, traffic that in a clearly organized stunt.

It's like not being able to put the trailer

up for the born ultimatum.

Yeah.

Like, like someone might shoot someone.

Someone might shoot someone.

Yeah.

Someone might drive them in.

And, and you're just like, but what is the limit?

And because that wasn't a commercially

available car as well.

Yeah.

It's not even, I mean, I really didn't

understand it, but yeah, it got,

got pulled.

So that was, I can't remember what the third

one was off my head now.

Um, but that's all because it's,

they're all adverts.

It's commercial.

There's that line where it's,

if it was, is there a line where it becomes a

marketing stunt that it's not an advert anymore?

Or is it when it's a manufacturer?

This is a really, really good question.

The, the line used to be below and above the

line that they were physically used to be the

term is an above line job.

And now that line has become completely

blurred because of

26:04 Advertising Regulations and Creative Freedom

multimedia.

And essentially, I think the only way that

being technical about it, I can differentiate

it is realistically captive or non-captive audience.

Are you being force fed this or finding it yourself?

Because like, what, what do you class Jim Carner as?

Like, I think, I think I would say that is

non-captive because you, you're seeking it.

It's a 10 minute monster energy commercial.

Yeah.

And, and you know, there's, we can put the

same warnings on the commercials saying like,

do not copy this to do this at home.

But it doesn't seem to make a slight bit of

difference as to you being susceptible to this.

Yeah.

They certainly haven't gotten any of the Jim

Carner films.

No, exactly.

Some of those involve actual crashing into stuff.

Yeah.

Like some of those.

Danger.

I mean, the, if I don't know if you've seen

the BJ Baldwin recoil films as well,

you know, which are wicked and he literally

rams through buildings by accident.

Yeah.

It's like, well, you know, I know that they fixed it.

But at the same time, well, it says that

YouTube stuff doesn't really get like it.

If you're solely YouTube, you don't,

you're not necessarily as affected by that.

But there's so much worse stuff going on on YouTube.

We have, because if you like,

look at Whistling Diesel, he's buying a,

like a G-Wagon.

He is testing it, driving it through a

building, skidding it on a road,

doing silly miles an hour and then going,

so yeah, you guys, you can do this with this car.

Yeah.

And YouTube's like, sounds great.

Makes you see the next week,

helicopters indoors.

Yeah.

Is the difference private land.

Yeah.

But it's also like, when we have closed

roads, in which case surely the other way,

the RM thing would have been fine,

because that was a private.

Yeah.

And that was shot at Benwater.

So I mean, that was literally just,

it was madness.

But this is the thing.

I think the world has, you know,

really gone a little bit too,

too sort of like, molly coddling,

far too much when it comes to having a bit of fun.

You know, I know that some people really do

need governing quite, quite strongly now,

because, you know, it's a bit of a wild place

out there at the moment.

But I think with Cara, of it's,

I don't think people are watching like,

like an MG EV advert.

And if it was doing sort of 80 in a 70s,

they're going like, oh, race car.

I'm gonna get that one.

That's the, you know, and just,

but it makes it look more exciting on film.

Otherwise, you just have a photo of a car and

it says car.

Buy it or don't.

I don't know.

Like four and a half meters of car.

Yeah, exactly.

There is, because on the flip side,

cars are something people buy emotionally.

Yes.

They've, I mean, all of the cars in here,

you didn't buy, 'cause you just went,

that looks cool.

You had some form of attachment to it.

So if you rob people of that from even a

marketing standpoint, which sounds a bit,

it's a bit weird to say like,

no, we want adverts.

Give me this capitalist agenda.

Yeah.

But if you're gonna have them,

you might as well have them be cool and be like fun.

They try and sell the whole car in an advert now.

It's like, they want it, you wanna hear about

the MPG and the factors, the economical.

It's like, just give me something that grabs

my attention and then I might go and look into it.

Remarkable things that have been getting,

going back to a little bit like what I said

on another pod was about the

disaster four or five years ago and BMW

started coming out

and literally just telling everyone who loved

BMW and M,

they were going like, you guys did it.

Yeah, the world's

moved on now and here's our...

You know, you basically go shut up,

Boomer.

And you're like, whoa, hang on a second.

This car designed quite a lot of,

you know, this car is quite responsible for

like BMW's like entire identity for a normal

time that actually did quite well.

You know, it's a way to alienate half of the

people that like your brand for what your brand is.

And also, you

know, let's not forget, you know,

some of the bigger tragedies recently where

people have just forgotten the history of the

brand, you know, the brand brands don't just

live off a brand name.

Yeah.

You know, if you want to start a new brand,

you start a new thing.

People don't forget the brand identity.

You know, you couldn't suddenly start

becoming a cooking show tomorrow.

People are expecting to see something that's

kind of what they know you guys for.

And that's what they love you for.

So that's, you can't, you could do an

offshoot of it, but it would need to be built

somewhere around the DNA of what you are known for.

Yeah.

And dropping something with such heritage and

such, you know, I'm glad they've kind of like

come back now because BMW M particularly are

really like pushing like the coolness again.

Yeah.

They've really come back hard and sort of

showing like how cool cars actually are.

And like how, you know, how young people

actually drive them, enjoy them just like the old days.

Yeah.

They've kind of, I'm so happy that they've

moved back to, you know, remembering why cars

are cool and why people love,

love cars.

Yeah.

Speaking on what, what is your dream

commercial advert production make?

Car brand, anything?

I mean, anything.

So for those at home that don't know,

like I spend like now is probably 75% of my

life in a CGI studio shooting or making films

that aren't real because modern cars are now

getting so complicated and so difficult and,

you know, moving how of moving them

logistically across Europe is so expensive

now and whatever.

So a lot of the big adverts that I make do

not exist in real life.

So whilst I love making those for the

creativity and flexibility, I still miss

hearing the sound of an engine and seeing a

car move for real.

Like the vibration and the noise and the

noise is like one of the biggest things I buy

any car for.

And the, any advert where you get to really

push a car properly is my ideal advert

because, you know, of sports car,

the car, the sports car market is getting quite small.

Yeah.

And especially the ones that are true sports

cars, not sort of hatchbacks dressed up into

hot hatches and stuff.

I know those are still cool,

but they're not like purpose built.

So that's the, any advert where there's a

little bit of spicy driving and a bit of going fast.

That is still my favorite kind of ever.

I do not care if it's a three million pound

Bugatti Tourbillon, or whether it's a 30,000

pound, I think the car exists for 30,000 pounds anymore.

But you know what I mean?

Something like that.

And it doesn't

matter.

As long as the car is emotionally exciting

and

engaging and it's real life.

That's why I love it.

33:00 Dream Commercial Advert Production

It's

not a downgrade.

They haven't lost the turbos and lost

soul.

What they've done is they've increased the

craziness

of the engine and it's now bananas.

It was always bananas.

But they were always like talking mid-range monsters.

And now it's like a mid-range to top in the screamer.

And the sound is outrageous.

I'd never heard a sound.

It's a new sound.

It's a brand new sound.

And because it's got a 1000 horsepower

electric assist as well, it's quite fast and

it sounds quite ridiculous.

And it's such a cool concept.

Everything is just cool.

It's also why Bugatti is so cool now.

But I think Bugatti are a little bit

different to what they were when the Veyron

came out again, that no one knew who was doing it.

The Veyron was just, again, like a Concorde.

built to do that speed.

But now you've got Matty Rimek posting videos

drifting in the snow.

But there is a bit more personality.

He's a car guy as well.

His car collection as well, like E30 and E30

and M5s and stuff.

You know that someone loves cars when that's their car.

Yeah, that's their car.

It feels like him and Christian von Kurney

say a little bit of competition.

It's definitely because of a bit of a bromance.

It's sort of because you'd know,

like 15 years ago, you'd never,

ever, ever seen the two CEOs sharing cars to

get and talking about cars in the world.

And I think that's so wholesome now.

And Christians, I mean, Christians cars are

incredible too.

Let's not take that away from them,

but they are quite different.

Or they may look similar purpose,

but they are quite different philosophy

designs and uses.

And I'd just love to see the fact that now

we've got this kind of like,

I guess they're sort of the people our age

who are just having fun and they know what they love.

And Marte's a younger and more exciting these

kind of very styled into the petrol head's

brain knowing what do they want to see,

what do they want to hear.

They knew, they made, I'm so glad they

pivoted away to make a combustion engine for

the next spaghetti and not make it for the electric.

Because that was, that could have been a

disaster for the people to become like,

well, it's very fast, above no interest in it.

Exactly.

The RIMAC is, it's funny seeing as they're

essentially sister brands.

you want to call them that, but no one talks

about RIMACs.

They are, when you look at the figures,

are absolutely mental.

But the moment you see that little thing that

says engine type electric, you're like,

all right, then.

Okay.

Yeah, fine.

I guess it's not necessarily an advert,

but you see a video of it and nothing wows you.

It's like the, was it the McMurtry,

yeah.

Yeah, that is unbelievably impressive.

But it's not talked about, unless it goes and

does a record or that, the clip where it goes

around the corner of the G3F,

people talk about that, but then you're not,

you don't find yourself yearning up.

No.

Like, I want to drive that, I want to own it.

I want to do that.

You want something that makes a noise that,

you know, I always, I always think about it

with, with that clip of it, with the G3FRS

and all I'm looking at is the G3FRS.

I don't even like G3FRS about you doing that much.

But I'm

like, they do look quite good though.

G3FRS is nice.

Yeah.

It is, I always, I always describe it as an,

you know, would you buy a really,

would you buy a £500,000 digital watch?

Yeah.

very good watch, undoubtedly,

and maybe made of exotic materials.

But the reality is, if you're going to spend

£500,000 on a, I don't know,

like a Jacob and Co, whatever they make,

with a million, good where they are,

you want the craftsmanship, you want the

thousands of hours of craftsmanship and that

insane mechanism inside of that,

you know, you want to see those beautiful

meshing things flicking around back and forth

and that, you know, that you want to see like

that tick, that talk, that noise,

everything, it's all, that's what people are buying.

It's the same when you turn the engine on,

if you move a, if you move it,

say a RIMAC, take example around a car park,

everyone's going to be sounds sounds like the MG.

Yeah.

Whereas you turn on the, you turn on

anything else with an engine as well,

you're like, that

sounds ridiculous.

And certainly it's got a voice and a soul.

And because I think was so inherently

switched on to noise as a species of just

people, you know, whether, whether,

whether you love the sound of loud cars or

hate them, and there are good and bad loud

cars, as we know, I'm looking at you,

the pop and crackle map gate,

the, a good engine set, it will evoke some

emotion in almost everybody,

whether it's wanted or not.

Could be slightly angry.

Yeah, they could, they could be angry,

but they will invoke an emotion.

Notent, you know, like speed is so accessible

and easy these days, you know,

like even the most basic, you know,

my wife has a Cadillac lyric,

which is, and it's not a particularly fast

EV, but it's still like what the fastest car I own.

Yeah, yeah.

Not to 60, like easily.

It's like, we had that Renault five,

and again, that's a base electric car,

wasn't the fast one.

And it's still like eight and a bit seconds to 60.

It's like, you're in 80s, 90s,

even early 2000s, hot hatch territory,

but it still doesn't make you feel like those cars felt.

No, I think Matt Watson briefly spoke about

it, either on a podcast or on the radio,

I can't remember where he compared the car

world currently to one watches at least,

sort of watches probably in like maybe the

60s or 70s, where the court's watch came out

and they said it was like, well,

this is way better.

Why wouldn't I just have that?

I don't have to charge it.

I don't have to put fuel in it.

I don't have to wind it up.

I don't have to do any of that.

But then after a while, now there is an

enthusiast segment that's massive that people

want those watches.

Yeah, it dies after two days,

but they want that thing that's technically

very impressive.

It's they know who made it, why they made it

because they wanted to make it.

So I think that's where I hope the car builds

going now, because at the moment,

it's hyper cars.

It's like you've got the gatty,

you've got Kurnex, you've got Gordon Murray

making that really impressive stuff.

But

for everyone else, it's like you have to buy

an older car

to get that level of stuff.

So hopefully you BMWs, even Renault's,

any of those, they now come out and go,

you know

what, we go.

It's something for an enthusiast.

I have a hot

take on this.

I have a hot take on this.

Because the governments who demanded it from

Switch to EV, did such a poor job of making

us get the EV charging infrastructure in

place and basically making it virtually

impossible to own one.

If you don't live in a city,

or you're lucky enough to charge at work or

home, which is a lot of people,

they have inadvertently created the comeback

of the best engines that we've ever seen,

basically.

There are some seriously cool cars coming out

and engines out now.

And now the fact that they sort of said,

well, maybe you can just use synthetic fuels then.

Because you can just put that into every

petrol station that exists around the world.

And we don't have to pour any more concrete.

And also there's no weird problem with the grid anymore.

Maybe that works.

So they may have inadvertently,

and I'm not going to give them any credit for

it, allowed us to experience the single greatest.

I mean, the stuff that's coming out of

Cosworth

at the moment is insane.

What I want is a Ford to go.

We want a four-cylinder turbo

Cosworth engine that we're going to chuck in

a new Mark 4

Focus RS, for example.

And then we get that resurgence of

90s high-tech, but low, lower,

lower cost cars that are

just fun.

That would be perfect.

And you can add, fine, add

hybrid if you need to, if you need to pass

whatever you need to.

As long as there's some sort of cool engine,

I actually think motorsports part of the

problem, because you think of some of the best engines.

They've normally come from motorsport,

inspired by, but you look at motorsport now,

you've got tiny engines, they're impressive

and they're very fast, but tiny engines in

Formula One, everything else is not outside

of it in the States with NASCAR and stuff.

But when you think of older race cars,

and it costs worth to your group A stuff

where you get the road car with basically the

same engine.

So motorsport, just start doing some really cool stuff.

I mean, it might start trickling its way down

to what we can get.

If they took a leaf out of GT3,

even at the moment, GT3, they're still being,

you can still just do a lap under full throttle.

I've been watching a lot of the analysis from

the 2026 F1 cars and the fact that they're

having to lift and coast for like 30% of the lap.

That's not for the one, is it?

It's not racing.

The whole point of it is go as fast as you

can to see if you can beat the other person.

It's not, strategy should be for the person

in the pits, who goes, you need to come in

now, you need to do this.

I have to go, I'm going for it and not going.

I really should conserve my battery.

So I'm like, no, come on, man,

that's not racing.

And I'm not convinced a single person in the

world is going to be looking at a single real

petrol heads going like, oh,

yeah, you know, the hybrid system really does

work well in F1.

Maybe that's what I want.

Like, I don't think there's a single person

goes, I wish I had an MG UK.

That'd be cool.

And they just want simplicity.

They want their engine to sound cool,

be reliable, go fast.

Or if they've got like a turbo car,

make silly turbo noises.

Yeah, that's true.

Because they do try and push that like

Mercedes, try and push it with that new C63

saying, it's just like the F1 system.

It's just like the F1 system,

which back in the day, if you said that,

it's just like similar to the one you'd get

in an F1 car, the E60 M5.

It's not actually that related to anything

sort of F1.

Because there is a tenuous link or Ferrari,

it still sounds like it.

You want it.

Ferrari with the 360 and 355 going,

this is an F1 gearbox.

And everyone overnight switching from auto to

manual to making manual a rare car.

Meanwhile now, no one wants that.

I can't answer it because Michael Schulmacher

got one of those.

That's it.

But the switching is quite harshly now.

We've got two drift cars behind it.

Well, ish, you're 86 and also the JZX 100.

Drifting has been always been a big part of your life.

What is the connection to drift works and film arson?

And also about outsiders Japan,

which I think for a lot of people listening

right now, they may not even know that you

are essentially behind that film.

It was now what 13 years ago,

11 years ago?

12 years ago?

Oh, that makes me feel old.

But over a decade ago, you put together

essentially documentary, vlog style,

which was not a big thing then,

really, of what it's like to go out to Japan to drift.

I remember watching that age,

I've been 15, 16, and thinking,

that's the coolest thing in the world I want to go.

But you're obviously quite close with

driftworks, and with Phil, where's that from?

That's right.

So it was, again, this is kind of like the

early stages of the career.

you know, aware that, you know,

that the media was quite a big part of what

was smaller, you know, you could propel quite

small companies quite widely with good content.

Before it was even really cool content,

that's a word that sort of popped up.

Yeah.

So now, and he kind of made an offer with him

and James said, like, well, why don't you

come and do a week a month for us?

Move away from London.

You know, you hate it there anyway.

So just like, come up and come up and come up

to Birmingham where it's all sunny.

And I was like, I've got no room.

Reason to stay in London.

So I packed up, moved to Birmingham.

Yeah, Birmingham is everything I expected it to

be.

So very quick.

And more or less, very quickly moved to

the outskirts of Birmingham.

Okay.

And, but more

importantly, Driftworks is right in the dead

center of Birmingham, which is kind of good

because it's slightly lawless there.

So, you know, that you have the Tisey short

course, which is, you know, essentially the Driftworks.

track around the, around the estate and

that's still good.

But the, that was when we sort of started

being able to produce like vloggy content and

kind of really kind of explore like early

YouTube vlog channel style things.

And it was really, we could have fun because

obviously I love hanging out with those guys.

You know, we all had exactly the same taste

in cars and driving and, you know,

we all just loved being a bit silly and,

you know, a bit noisy and more importantly,

like going to racetracks and skidding around

and having fun.

So being able to like have my commercial work

and then have this sort of kind of rogue

skunk works sort

of make what I wanted to project.

So in one minute, you'd be editing a,

you know, a Land Rover, Range Rover

commercial, going like, oh, the leather seats

in this new,

the Holland and Holland version is made of

the Fiders led.

And then this side, you just got like,

can we turn the anti-lag on and try and see

if we can shatter a window with it?

Yeah.

So there was this kind of like wonderful side

that we kind of had that.

And that was kind of the driftworks,

that's the driftworks connection.

And then outsiders came around completely,

accidentally, really, it was never ever meant

to be a documentary.

The idea was that when they were going to go

out and do like a couple of weeks or three

weeks, I think it was, we were out there to

go and experience Japan.

There wasn't so much of an agenda to film

something, but I said like, what if I did

come and I will pay my way?

by making a DVD that we sell at the end of it.

What if I come with?

Yeah, that would be cool, right?

Yeah, guys, what have I...

So we ended up going out and I bought out a

jib, which was, they seemed ridiculous at the

time, but there were no drones,

obviously no one had a drone back then,

drones were like helicopters.

But I wanted a way to be able to like lift

the camera up a little bit and do some like

cool cinematic shots to use the word.

So all in good jest, they all helped.

to carry this massive A-frame weights and

levers and cables and stuff.

So we had a jib that I could just put my

little Canon 5D on and just shoot some

interesting angles that weren't just ground

level handhelds or shaky cam.

And then we got very lucky with some street

drifting, the guys put on some mind control

put on some like crazy street drifting for us.

And that was just a really, really cool sequence.

And then we shot some other bits and pieces

went out to a few other tracks and stuff and

then came back and I'm like,

right, I feel like we've actually got quite a

good potential film here.

We should chuck some talking heads in sort of

like glue it all together.

And that was all we did.

We were like, well, let's give that a go.

Let's try and glue it all together and see

what we can assemble,

made the film, put it out some Blu-ray and

DVD and we sold out.

And it was crazy.

I was like, oh, that's cool.

We only got the number of DVDs that we got

because you got a bulk discount.

And then we thought like that's actually

really, really cool.

And then like three years later,

maybe, yeah, I think once, you know,

a good amount of time would pass.

We thought, well, let's put it out onto YouTube.

No one minded.

Everyone was cool with it.

They were like, oh, that's cool.

So the DVD people would watch it.

You've got the physical copy.

So we kind of figured it enough time would pass.

And yeah, and it, again, that kind of really

kind of popped off.

And I still get some wonderful message even

today from people saying like,

when are you doing the next one?

Yeah, yeah.

to making the second one, but we never had

the right opportunity in the right timing.

And I'd like to do number two properly.

Yeah, because I think that's the,

because technically Mike Kamod's did,

I think Turbo's and Temples One came out a

few years before, would have been right

around the same time, but not on YouTube.

That's right.

So I'd seen that, I saw that first,

and not to take anything away from those

guys, but it was a more polished,

like kind of how we film a YouTube video

where there was a little bit of scripting

involved, that sort of stuff.

Whereas the beauty of outsiders was,

this is what it's like going to Japan and

just doing it.

Oh, it was the discovery, it was the

exploration, the discovery, and all of those

things that you can't really repeat.

I think they'd been before, and they knew

kind of like what the game was and everything.

Whereas we were just going, wow,

this is this is ridiculous.

And just documenting it.

Just literally just documenting it.

And we had just enough contacts to help us go

to the cool places and see the cool stuff.

And it wasn't particularly well documented at

the time either.

So no one had really sort of got a lot of the

street drifting the way that was done.

That was the first time I'd ever seen it.

I'd heard about it on forums and people

talking about it.

But that was the first time I ever saw how

actually just rogue it is.

It's just people turning off and go mental.

There's obviously people along the course who

are watching out for things,

but it's, hey, what happens happens?

Run it.

It's crazy.

All I'd ever seen was the sketchy VHS rips.

You kind of get them from OI War from whatever.

And then when you're actually down there,

and seeing it, you're like, oh,

this is way harder.

Listen, they went really, really hard.

And you could see that this was something

special and they'd be doing like nine colors

going in at once and stuff.

And we're like, this is stupid.

And now we were very, very lucky that day.

I've seen subsequently quite a lot of other

kind of really good films come out of that.

But I think we just captured the right thing

at the right time to the right audience as

well, who perhaps less informed,

not that informed about Japan.

And we were on that learning road and we

can't repeat that again.

And now I've been there a few times with work and stuff.

And I'm going there at my honeymoon in April

and it's going to be all lovely.

But I'll never experience New Japan again.

No, exactly.

It was your first time.

But that to me is what made it so perfect

because it felt like as watching it,

it's your first time there as well.

If it was, yeah, this is this place,

we always come here.

You go, all right.

Okay.

So you're a local at this point,

but being new to it makes you feel like,

all right, we're doing this together.

So it was really cool.

Yeah.

So yeah, if you haven't watched outsiders,

search it up on YouTube.

If you're any form of interested in drifting

at all, you

51:13 Outsiders Documentary in Japan

will enjoy it.

1:12:39 Future Car Plans and Pinch Yourself Moments

car?

I genuinely, I look and look and until I sort

of think about something for a long time,

I go, I'm not going to buy it because I'll

have like, you know, you go for,

because also, I will point out,

you know, when I bought the Ferrari,

there was that sort of sweet spot of PCP time

when you could buy things for,

and now, you know, the amount of money that

it would cost to finance that,

you know, if you want to go down that route

is astronomical now.

So I kind of took advantage of the back of

that cheap period of time.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's almost, it was good.

And because those cars don't lose any money

at all, you know, the same value when you go

in and out, you kind of get to the end of it

and you're in positive equity.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's, that's your plan on the

glardo, right?

That's the goal with it.

Yeah.

It's not an investment as such,

but if you can only car, you've always wanted it.

It's the wisest way without losing a shed

load of money.

Yeah.

It's much nicer.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So that, that was the deal with the Ferrari.

But the, I haven't, there's nothing else that

really tickles my fancy, and I keep looking

back at F-12s going like, if I ever bought

another one, but is that the definition of insanity?

Yeah.

I think quite literally.

Because, because again, like,

I know two or three other people who have got

them, abused them and they have no issues with them.

Yeah.

And I'm like, why did mine break constantly?

But I mean, everything went wrong and that

cut the steering wheel exploded.

The computer inside it just stopped working.

The gearbox exploded, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, every ton of its pieces like that.

And it was just, you know, I bought a high

mileage-ish car with the idea that that had been used.

And so all of the, everything's been worked out.

Yeah.

Because the worst thing, you don't want to

buy a car that hasn't been used because cars

that don't get used explode constantly.

I don't think it makes a difference in

that car.

So no, there is no current plan to do that.

In anything, you know, it would be something older again.

I've missed the boat, I think,

on like the Ablo's and Merci Lago's.

Unfortunately, they've just doubled in price overnight.

Unfortunately, that is our mainly will,

but mine as well.

Merci Lago is one of the end gold cars and

it's just getting further and further away.

Yeah.

And it wasn't that long ago that you could

buy a, like an early Diablo for a hundred.

Yeah.

And now they are 200 going on further.

It's the thing that we said with the,

like, with the Delta that I always wanted a

Delta Evo to.

So a friend had some money to spend and so

imported, he paid for it, imported it to the UK.

I did it up and sold it for him.

And because I just always wanted one,

I knew you'd buy one.

After selling it, I think we sold it at 45.

That car's now 80.

If I ever get 80 together, that car will be 150.

It will just always keep moving away from you at that.

And that's the, that is the most frustrating

thing in the world.

Yeah.

There's no, there's no catching up with it.

I mean, I try not to think

about it, but like I bought this,

this, this car has possibly used to tripled

in values and so bought it.

This one is easily doubled.

That's easily doubled.

Does it stop?

Does it make you drive them any different?

It does until I put a helmet on.

And then you're like, and then you're like,

and then you're like race car.

Yeah, then you're just like,

I'm safe.

Let's go.

To be honest, no, I try not to.

I tried to be, I tried to think about a car

as the value that I bought it at.

I was happy to buy it and crash it.

Isn't yeah.

At the time.

Yeah.

And nothing's changed other than that.

To you.

That's the cost.

to get rid of these cars.

They are everything I love about cars.

The personality, the driving,

they're so different in their own different ways.

And they represent such a, their own unique

corner of driving.

And I think honestly, I think something is

really missing.

I think like an old classic would be awesome

from a sort of like 60s, 70s.

American English, I think given the route

we're probably going, they've looked at like

240s ends and stuff like that.

Oh, nice.

Very nice.

Something that we can kind of cruise around.

Yeah, slowly.

Again, a really annoying car.

I remember looking, this would have been

2013, right when I was starting to look for

my first car.

And there was a project 240Z that I think it

had an MOT the previous year,

but needed some stuff to get through the next one.

And it was three and a half thousand pounds.

And I could have like sold it,

basically sold every, I had saved up some

money for my first car.

I could have sold like bought and sold some

more wheels and stuff to make it happen.

And my mom was like, you're not having car

from 1971 as your first car,

you will buy, which is fair,

I would have, but I would have been very cool

to have a 240Z of first car.

It won't lose any money, you'll be dead.

But now like cars, that's a 30,

40 grand project and a 50, 60 grand working car.

It's just tough, rough.

It is absurd.

I keep every day I check Mercy Loggers and I

just pray, I'm looking at an auction going

one or sell for a sub hundred grand,

but they just don't.

You just want that sort of strange one that

no one really wants.

It's off an auction, but everyone's so wise to it.

The real sad part is, is all the speculation

over values and stuff.

Because they won't get used.

Thankfully, so when we were in Monterey last

year, we've talked about a few times,

we met a guy there who bought one,

he has that in a glardo and he was like,

"I bought it because of hot pursuit.

It was on the cover.

It was my favorite car.

I let any let us drive it.

You let us absolutely blast it around.

It's what it's made for.

I'm not putting it in a garage so it can make some money.

I bought that for really upsetting.

Especially in dollars, I was like,

"That's a bargain."

But I was out in, when I was out in Finland,

I was showing some German friends and some

Austrians, like the prices of cars in the UK.

We're very lucky.

They were brain melting over how cheap we can get stuff.

Well, we're looking for our next,

we buy cars together as like a car each and

we do a series on them.

We're looking at cheap Italian cars and we're

both looking mainly at a portrait.

either a 3200 or 4200 GT, five to six grand

gets you a car with an MOT that you can drive

down the road.

It will break, it will blow up.

But you still got a road legal Maserati for

five to six grand.

Name a more gangster car than a coach reporter.

But that car that is from Birmingham here

that is about to fall apart,

even that in Italy, that's a 15 to 20,000

euro car for the horrible one.

We are very lucky in some aspects.

1:19:00 Pinch Yourself Moments

Joanna's Portuguese and her friends back

home, she shows me the online stuff.

She bought a reasonably cheap E46 M3 and her

friends were like, "Did you win a lottery?"

And she's like, "No, they are free here."

This is the first time I'm looking at the

taxes and just the general value of it.

So we do actually have it quite good here.

I'm coming to see you early here first.

UK delivered later on.

Exactly.

Dropping in price.

Did you have any other questions?

I don't think so.

Let me double check my list.

Let me check my list.

Actually, that was a very generic question,

but you've worked with a lot of big stars and

big cars, but has there ever been a pinch

yourself, like the standout pinch yourself,

moment or person or car?

You've had a lot of big moments.

I tell you one that I always remember really,

there's two particularly.

The biggest surprise, which was Michelle

Rodriguez in Nevada doing 200 miles an hour

on an F-Type, on a public road,

which was a closed public road,

but 200 miles an hour.

She was so cool and just into cars and just a total vibe.

She was wicked to work with.

She just was interested, helpful,

did everything really well.

A lot of the F1 drivers, Max Verstappen,

was amazing actually to work with.

He doesn't suffer fools gladly,

but he's a properly good guy.

But this is slightly older audience

potentially now, but the job that really

stands out for me was working with Sterling

Moss for such a long time.

Just before his health declined particularly,

and the legends that we got to do,

we did this documentary originally shot for

Jaguar, which ended up going on to Sky documentary.

And that was about how Sterling Moss and a

test driver called Norman Dewis essentially

responsible for the disc brake that is in

every single car in the world.

So for those at whom we don't know,

Dunlop, the tyre company, made aeroplane disc

brakes, which they then wanted to try and

make that technology work on cars.

And they'd failed, but Norman Dewis,

who was bought over in the time,

made the technology work.

And he is responsible for the disc brake that

is on every single car that you're probably

going to touch for the rest of your lives.

And Sterling was the driver,

the racing driver, who won the first racing,

the first race on a car with disc brakes on a C-type.

And we were telling that story,

but as a result, we just got access to some

of the most extraordinary people and racing legends.

And we took Sterling down to Reams and just

the, that was such a special,

such a special time to do those three,

four months.

three times to go and hang out with him and

Suzy and just kind of like drink gin at 10

o'clock at the morning and stuff.

But, and that film wasn't ever even going to

go out, right?

Wasn't going to go out.

It sat on a shelf for years and years and

years until Sterling died, during Easter,

when it was now, it was kind of like the

COVID time, wasn't it?

And I just thought, we have to make this film

exist, because like I had all the footage.

So I spoke to all the relevant people,

spoke to JAG and JAG were like,

yeah, go on that.

actually.

And I was not fair on them, because they

said, yep, go and make that story happen.

So they released all the footage out,

and we made the film and put it out on the

sky and gave it to them for free basically,

so that it could exist.

Yeah, just it's out there.

Which is epic.

Yeah.

And so that's my, that will be forever my

most grateful job,

1:22:49 The Races Who Stopped the World Film

to sort of having spent that time with those

legends and hear like the crucible of these

lunatic stories that you've,

that are never ever going to be repeated.

No, yeah.

In different times now.

So that's the one I'm most grateful for.

Yeah, that's very cool.

It's called The Races Who Stopped the World.

And yeah, you can see it on YouTube now

actually for free as well.

There you go, that's your next project.

After you've finished listening to this,

you can go ahead and listen to that.

Happy there.

I think that's all for me.

I think that is a perfect place to end this.

Thank you very much to Al Clark for being on

the Cream Podcast.

Also, by the way, if you're an audio listener

and you've been wondering why there's been

rustling the whole time, we're on bean bags.

We are on bean bags.

That's probably why.

I've declined a significant amount.

I think podcast bean bags are definitely the future.

I

do quite like the idea of it.

We'll see you in a few days

time for another episode of the Cream Podcast

back in the

unit with Little Benjamin.

See you then.

Cars Rule

Everything Around Me.

And we should be on chairs.

Filming Bugattis With Bugattis, Banned Adverts and Meeting Legends - C.R.E.A.M. Ft Al Clark

Transcript

0:00 Introduction and Welcome

3:11 Al's Career Journey from Track Days to Car Filming

8:26 Filming the Supra Commercial for Volkswagen

17:17 Fighter Pilot Training and MX-5 Beginnings

21:24 The Shift from Car Posters to Video Content

26:04 Advertising Regulations and Creative Freedom

33:00 Dream Commercial Advert Production

51:13 Outsiders Documentary in Japan

1:12:39 Future Car Plans and Pinch Yourself Moments

1:19:00 Pinch Yourself Moments

1:22:49 The Races Who Stopped the World Film