NEWS

BANGERS4BEN is well underway, and all of the crews are reporting good news back to base. Indeed, most of our intrepid Bangers4BEN entrants are now at the hotel, it seems. And what a journey it’s been for some! TomHyundai has a car heater stuck on full. Good for Scotland? Not when you’ve a car full [...]

BANGERS4BEN has made it to another country, we’ve just seen – via the magic of in-car tracking! The white Audi Cima Racing’s Phil has hooked up has flashed up the good news. It confirms Bangers4BEN is, once again, international. This means the rest of the teams will be making great progress too – we’ve heard [...]

ALL the Bangers4BEN crews are now on the motorway, heading North… and immediately, the convoy has split! Some have chosen M6, others have chosen M1. Who will win? We’ll find out later in the day. Seems it’s lunchtime now though, and service stations all along the route are having the gasps of our teams. HOW [...]

BANGERS, frost, fog and a fair few fuggy heads broke the peace of icy Sunninghill this morning:  Bangers4BEN is go! Teams gathered for the air-horn start at the remarkable HQ BEN does its fine work from, for quick role-calls and photo-calls, before setting off for Up North. It really was a remarkable collection of cars [...]

THE kindness of strangers in this game never ceases to amaze me – especially when it comes to Bangers4BEN. Earlier this year, when we made our trip around the country people fell over themselves to help us out of a spot of bother. And now, come Bangers4BEN MkII, it’s no different. Firstly there’s the 26 [...]

SO who’s taking part in our Bangers4BEN challenge and what are their plans for the great rally? Here you can read about the 26 teams that took up our challenge to buy a ‘banger’ for £250 and drive it to John O’Groats for automotive industry charity BEN. For the full details on Bangers4BEN, read this [...]

BANGERS4BEN is an event organised by Car Dealer Magazine and motor industry charity BEN to raise much needed funds. 26 teams of two will be driving up and down the country on November 9, 10 and 11 in cars they bought for no more than £250. Participants include main dealers from across the UK, independent [...]

DRIVE a snotter of a scrapper, said Hyundai, and raise cash for WOMAC. Sounded pretty good to us, we reckoned. After all, isn’t Bangers4BEN all about driving old cars over zany distances, and raising cash for charity? This would thus be good practice. One Rover Maestro was thus duly delivered. Complete with exposed primer, smell [...]

VISITORS to this December’s BEN Ball are to enjoy an extra-special treat – songs from Rolf Harris. The Aussie entertainer will perform all his hits at the Grosvenor House Hotel event. Just the thing to mark the 75th year of the huge Dinner, says BEN director Charles Davis. ‘The BEN Ball is traditionally the most [...]

SAT in that pub back in January on a wet, gloomy winter’s evening, the Car Dealer team could never have imagined how big a beast Bangers4BEN would become. What started out as four blokes wanting to get away for the weekend and do something a bit different, turned into a charity challenge that rasied £1,600 [...]

BANGERS4BEN– our Top Gear-inspired motor trade challenge is back – but this time we want you to get involved! You may remember, back in February, four members of the Car Dealer team decided to raise money for automotive industry charity BEN in a unique way. Over a series of weeks we each hunted down a [...]

AUTOMOTIVE industry charity BEN has announced job cuts – due to both the recession and rising demand for its resources. New car sales down nearly a third mean the car industry cannot maintain a high level of contributions to BEN. This has seen income decline by 10 percent over the past 12 months. Even more [...]

LIKE most 15 year olds, my Calibra is a bit sluggish, smells funny, makes strange groaning and grunting noises and has developed some unsightly acne (rust)… But today I’m grieving – as I’ve had to sell it. After covering over 1,500 miles in the coupe, over three days for our Bangers4BEN challenge I became rather attached [...]