Video: SMMT North test drive day 2011

Champion motoring correspondent and Life On Cars writer David Simister has travelled to Wetherby to try out some of this autumn's new motoring arrivals:

Full road tests of all the cars David drove will appear on both Life On Cars and in The Champion in the coming weeks.

Lost in Yorkshire: Part Two

TECHNICALLY speaking it was a weekend wasted. What I learned was something I already knew: that the best road in Britain is the Buttertubs Pass.

Not that it wasn't fun finding out on the latest in a series of adventures in the Great British Countryside, set this time largely to a soundtrack of squealing tyres and a walkie talkie Sello-taped to the steering wheel. I'm happy to report that none of us, despite my best efforts in the pretty Lancashire village of Dunsop Bridge, got lost. However, I did learn the following:

1) Never do a half-arsed job when checking your car before you leave. This was why I did the entire run in a Rover with one of its brake lights broken and a distinctly unglamorous steel wheel on one corner (I'd forgotten the tyre on the original alloy was knackered). We also had a Mini which permanently needed oil. We got them sorted, but they were still schoolboy errors.

2) Do not stop for lunch at The Anchor Inn, just outside Gargrave on the A65. After waiting more than 25 minutes for fairly simple pub grub, one of our party was served a ham and cheese sandwich which was stone cold on one side and incinerated on the other. He sent it back and was promptly served a second sandwich, which was full of hair. Not nice.

3) By all means do stop for lunch at The Bolton Arms, in the picturesque village of Leyburn. Not only does the beer garden offer a stunning view of the Yorkshire Dales, but the staff are lovely and accomodating and the food is top notch. Thoroughly recommended!

4) If you're taking a party of 12 petrolheads, plan everything with military precision. Otherwise you'll end up stuck in York city centre on a sticky Saturday evening surrounded by refugees from bad hen night parties, wondering why it seems to take an eternity to get a taxi. A particularly poignant lesson if, like me, you're a bit knackered after six hours of solid motoring and fancy a pint on your evening out.

5) The Travelodge in Tadcaster is not as bad as the reviews make it out. After not enjoying the idea of youth hostelling on our previous adventure to Wales, some of our group weren't excited by the idea of cheap-as-chips hotels. But it was nice. No, really, it was.

6) I know a worrying amount about trains, as I found out on our group outing to the National Railway Museum. I'll happily admit to knowing a lot about cars, but should I be able to tell you the High Speed Train is a Class 43 diesel loco hauling a rake of British Rail MK3 carriages? Probably not. I'm sorry.



7) Classic car shows which get organised in York city centre which you didn't know were taking place are well worth the visit, as some of the pictures here show.

Most importantly, it proves that weekends away with your mates are still really good fun. That's why I'm looking forward to the next one.

Lost in Yorkshire: Part One

IT WAS when Cheshire Constabulary's finest pulled up behind me that I realised walkie talkies would have been a good idea.

The idea was to head for the hills of North Wales, which you might have read about back in January, but what I hadn't mentioned was the massive cockup as we crossed the Runcorn Bridge. With our convoy split up in rush hour traffic, two of our team took the right lane and two the wrong one. This how I'd ended up parked on a bridge above the M56 with my hazards on, trying to explain to the local Plod how I was trying to spot a lost Mini Cooper on the motorway, which had only minutes earlier escaped the motoring Bermuda Triangle that is the Runcorn one way system.

Anyone who's ever organised a classic car run of any kind will already know what I learned that stressful day; that getting drivers to form a convoy and stick to it is like trying to herd cats. You can plan a route with military precision and offer up page upon page of pointers and directions, but if you're in a strange and unfamiliar corner of the country it's amazing how quickly a traffic jam, a set of roadworks or a confusing roadsign can right royally knacker things up.

So walkie talkies, at £20 a set plus the cost of some sticky tape, could be the best investment I've ever made.

Okay, so strictly speaking the Binatone Latitude 150 is actually a two-way radio rather than a walkie talkie, but more importantly it's as much a tool as it's a toy, as I'm hoping to find out this weekend on the way to the pretty city of York, on our latest adventure.

Some of my motoring mates are already hard at work, thinking of cheesy callsigns and pranks to play to break up the boredom of a three hour slog through the Dales, but what I'm really looking forward to is people having no excuse to get lost.

Will the entire trip disintegrate into a series of silly practical jokes? Will we end up completely lost in a small village somewhere near Settle? Will the sticky tape holding the walkie talkie last the drive out of Lancashire?

Tune in next week to find out...