Ford Fair 2001 was a great day out, but there were several probelms with the venue, in as much as layout for example and things to watch motorsport wise was fairly lacking too...so could a change of venue to Silverstone race circuit and another year of planning better the event and improve on the year before?

Well, in a word yes! The layout was much better, there was plenty of traders, burger vans, motorsport to watch, cars to gawp at and bar the odd sprinkle it even stayed dry and sunny!

Thinks were looking up...

...As my Fiesta was on stand with the FordSport club I was in a way fortunate enough to be allowed in a little earlier to get the car ready and give it a wipe over to de-fly it! This enabled me to miss the larger queues to get in and get ready for the thousands of visitors to Ford Fair 2002 (around 16,000 visitors in fact!)

The event in case you don't know is held annually and is co organised by FastFord magazine and Classic Ford magazine...with some of the publications previous feature cars being on show at the event too!

The show featured several different areas, with something for everyone, there were traders supplying chrome engine goodies by the bucket load, there was the concours section, circuit action and of course hundreds of cars from visiting car clubs, so there was plenty to see and spend your sterling on!

The concours section was extremely impressive this year with the overall standard of the cars being one of the highest I have seen...as well as the totally standard cars there were highly modified cars to a concours level which are just as if not more impressive to some people.

There were too many cars to go through them all so here are a selection of my favourite...

There was a white Escort Cosworth (see above) that was absolutely spotless and had an engine bay that was painfully clean and shiney!

My favourite XR2 (which was at last years Ford Fair) with awesome pearlescent paintwork, Turbo conversion and a very tidy and shiney engine bay really stood out from the others (which is saying something)

An orange MK2 Escort with Cosworth engine was particularly impressive (below left) as was the mad paint and Nitrous on this Escort van (below right)

Meanwhile while all the concours entrants were busy polishing and preping away the track action could be heard as the bellow from several cosworths sounded out!

It was great to see a whole host of Ford's cars being driven properly, including everything from a MK1 Escort right through to Sierra and Escort Cosworth's.

A special mention to the driver of the RS1600i that was giving it some serious "beans" round the circuit and was keeping some other hugely more powerful cars at bay, as well as locking up at high speeds entering some of the corners! Entertaining stuff!

We decided to move our viewing position from the run off from copse right round to the BMW bridge just before it enters the grand stand area of the circuit...from here we could see the cars at full whack and for some this must of been in the order of 130mph, which sounded awesome lap after lap!

A moonstone and black 3dr Cosworth also deserve a mention as there little tear ups were brilliant to watch and they were both absolutely flying round, putting in what appeared to be some very impressive lap times.

Times varied from what you would expect for the car, with some dipping a fair bit below expected, probably because of some serious mods...The best car of the day by far was a Sierra cosworth that hit around 3.5 seconds twice to 60 before trumping even his own time by recording a 0-60 in 2.99 seconds!!! Thats right a sub 3 second to 60 sierra cosworth!

It was later learned that the car was producing in the region of 430bhp on its own with a 70 shot of N2O on top of that for good measure, either way it was very impressive stuff and sounded absolutley awesome going up the strip!

The rest of Silverstone was packed full of visiting car clubs, all of which showing some fine examples of the blue oval!

There were stands from FordSport, many branches of RSOC, FCGB, XROC and even some of the older classic car clubs were present with some awesome MK1 and 2 Escorts to name but just one marque!

There was a huge selection of autojumble and all throughout the day people could be seen lugging bumpers and side skirts over there shoulder (no doubt thinking they should of secured it and picked it up later!)

There was even an area for cars to be sold...this presented a great opportunity for the sellers to exhibit there cars to the types of people that they want buying their car, as well as for buyers as there was a concentrated number of modified cars for sale all in one area!

This years event had better content, better layout and more to see and do than last years event and the pluses should be built on to ensure that next years Ford Fair is even better and that this type of event grows from strength to strength!

Hopefully all the traffic issues will be ressolved or at least bettered by next year too, as that was the only real down point!

Well done to the event organisers and to everyone who had a go on track and sprint as you provided great entertainment to us all, and also to all the visiting car clubs for providing such a wide and varied number of superb cars to get inspiration from!

Roll on Ford Fair 2003!