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STYLISHVauxhall Magazine; July 2006

Know ParkingKnow Parking

The Astra VXR is known for its performance and style - but it's the sporty Astra's agility that made it one of the stars of the MPH '06 shows, with a little help from another show-stopper. Words by Martin Gurdon pictures by Simon Stuart-Miller

Should you ever be asked to nominate ten fun things to do, parking is unlikely to be one of them. Even if the car is one of Vauxhall's fun-centred VXR range. That's unless you are Paul Swift - a 27-year-old 'precision driver' who earns his living by making life behind the wheel fun, with a mix of competition-honed skills and stunt driving techniques, which are regularly on display all over the world.

'I do about fifty shows a year', he says, but he was beaming when Vauxhall asked him to create a show-stopping spectacle involving parking an Astra VXR in a very small space as part of the 75-minute car theatre centrepiece of the recent MPH '06 event, fronted by Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson and James May in Birmingham and London.

The fact that he would be going very quickly and making this manoeuvre using handbrake turns rather than the careful backward/forward shuffle most of us employ, probably helped. And the twist that he would challenge a battery of celebrities to do the same, and sit in the car with each of them as they made their attempts, also lifted the idea from the prosaic to the highly amusing.

Paul (whose father Russ is equally famous for this kind of thing) has been having fun with Vauxhalls for a very long time.


'I did my first display with them when I was seven years old', he says - zinging about in an open-topped, child-sized model of a Nova.

But it's full-sized Vauxhall only for his MPH set piece, making an Astra VXR jink, pirouette and park very neatly alongside a thundering Monaro coupe and a Kung Fu expert who adds another level of motoring mayhem, and of who more later.

Paul is currently UK Autotest champion. 'Autotesting', he says, 'is all about handbrake turns and reverse spins against the clock, being as precise as possible without hitting markers or cones. But show producers prefer solid objects like cars to cones; so we put on performances with lots of near misses. When you're sharing a stage with other cars, rope artists, Ninjas, acrobats and marshal artists, though, and you're flying at them backwards, you take the fun very seriously - because above all, any show has to be as safe as possible'. >