The Easter Thunderball at Santa Pod in a couple of weeks marks the beginning of the 21st year of racing for the Volkswagen Drag Racing Club. They're the biggest single-marque drag race club in the world and cater for both aircooled and watercooled dubs, from daily drivers to out-and-out full-race monsters. It's a remarkably cheap motorsport to get involved in (no motorsport is ever truly "cheap" though!) and it can be spectacular to watch.

 I asked Chris Bray, who runs the VWDRC website, for some pointers as to who is going to be worth looking out for this year: "Initially at Easter Thunderball we've got Jay Aldred's buggy, now he's got his turbo problems fixed he's making over 500bhp! James Hodson is after the FWD record back (in his Mk2 Golf), he's going to be knocking on 500bhp too! Russ Fellows will be doing a full season, he's got the first official 9 second street bug in the UK and he genuinely does drive it there and drive it home, he even drove it from Chester to Northampton for the AGM early December last year!"

Retro Scene Magazine will be in attendance at as many rounds as possible too,  I'll be part of the crew for Abigail Tether in her Split-Screen Samba.

The BBC aired a one-off comedy/drama special recently - "Phoo Action" on BBC Three. It was based around work by Jamie Hewlett (responsible for Tank Girl and the Gorillaz characters), was set in a highly stylised near-future world and featured lots of fast paced comic-book action.

The star of the programme for car lovers had to be the Lancia Stratos, a shape so wildly wacky when it first appeared in the early 1970s that it still looks fresh in the near-tomorrow.

Along with the Audi Ur-Quattro in "Ashes to Ashes" and countless adverts and music videos featuring plenty of retro-iconic machinery we're seeing much more of our scene on screen. That can only be a good thing, in a world where the car is increasingly demonised as an environmental monster we need all the appreciation and enthusiasm we can get.