PH secures funding to build driving resort

Haymarket is investing £50m in its motoring titles - we're spending our chunk properly!

We'll forgive you if this passed you by but PistonHeads owners Haymarket announced a huge investment this week to support the creation of a standalone motoring media division together with our colleagues at Autocar and What Car? This was all presented to us in a special meeting on Monday, bosses keen to emphasise the headline figure of £50m to expand the business.

We can do this in England, right?

Sure, much of that will be going into serious stuff like technical infrastructure, recruitment and marketing. But we weren't about to let our share of that pot get blown on scatter cushions and 'breakout areas' in our new office. We don't need a fancy coffee machine either - a kettle and box of Yorkshire Tea will do us. And while it might be nice to get a glitzy new homepage and forum architecture the old ones have done us since 1998. To paraphrase the well-known saying it occasionally breaks and we do fix it. But like tinkering with a much-loved classic car that's all part of the charm.

Having experienced various 'driver resorts' like the famous Ascari Race Resort and new players like The Thermal Club in Palm Springs, where we drove the BMW M760Li, we had an idea. Yes, we're going to build a PH driving resort. Kind of like Center Parcs. With a track.

To join The Thermal Club you have to commit to buying an on-site mansion for $3m and membership fees of $100,000 per year. We're guessing that wearing anything racier than chinos and deck shoes will be frowned upon too. PH World will be a little more accessible and rather less pretentious, the dress code nothing more strict than jeans and the PH T-shirt of your choice. Nor do you have to have a garage full of Bugattis and Paganis before we'll consider your application. Obviously ownership of a TVR will help, but all members will also be expected to own at least one sub-£1,000 car bought from the PH classifieds. Which you'll need if you're to participate in our Shed Of The Week Race of Champions, which will take place every Friday morning. This will at least keep the family entertained, PH World very much intended as somewhere for 'children' of all ages!

These are here for the drift school

So where are we going to build it? Well, the black hole in the Ministry of Defence's coffers reported over the last few days may be bad news for those wanting new Trident submarines or, y'know, planes to fly off those expensive aircraft carriers we're building. But it's good news for those in the market for large areas of real estate the government may be looking to sell off to plug the funding gap. The fabulous Bilsterberg resort in Germany was, after all, built on an old British army munitions dump. And who doesn't like the idea of a PH pub and pie shop based out of an old nuclear bunker? We're currently evaluating a number of sites and, as is standard for these places, a compilation of our favourite corners to include in the track layout. Suffice it to say, we reckon we can do a better job of this than Hermann Tilke. We're not sure if the idea of a Scalextric style crossover is entirely sensible but there will definitely be a tunnel so we can enjoy our noisy exhausts without annoying any local NIMBYs.

More details as the plans progress but, we're sure you'll agree, this would seem to be the most PH way possible of using that significant investment our bosses are putting into the business.

Track photo: Ascari

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CS Garth

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