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“Ride in A Ferrari 2004” took place at its new venue of the Wyevale Garden Centre near Dorchester on Saturday 5th June. The proceeds went towards the Jennifer Trust funding family care days nationwide where affected individuals, their parents and siblings get to meet appropriate professionals for help and guidance with living day-to-day with the condition of Spinal Muscular Atrophy. The format for the event is now well known and established but just to reiterate for any members who haven’t attended or who don’t know about Ride…….we give rides to paying members of the public over a set road route for a minimum donation of £10 to the Jennifer Trust charity. This £10 is inclusive of all passengers if more than one person wishes to ride in a 2+2 car such as the 308GT4 or Mondial models. Very often we have found that it is small children who want to ride with Mum (or more usually) Dad and we are happy to accommodate this, if we have the cars and drivers available. The set road route gives the paying passengers a chance to experience what riding in a Ferrari is like for around 10 minutes and from our new venue at Owermoigne this includes a dual carriageway, some tight turns at the turnaround points and a long run on a two-lane road. On the day itself this year we had 12 Ferraris, two Porsche 911s and an Aston Martin Vanquish brought by Ben Oliver of Autocar magazine, who had given us a preview in the weeks before the event on the editor-in-chief’s page. The main news this year is that Melissa Gibbons, who is the Fundraising Assistant for the Jennifer Trust charity, was able to tell me they made an eventual total of £2600 to fund their continuing good works. The oldest customer we had this year was a gentleman of 89 and the youngest were a number of children who chose to ride with Mum or Dad in the only 2+2 we had, Tim Gosling’s Mondial Cabriolet (thanks, Tim, you knew you were going to be popular). Among the guests we had this year were Dorset’s Assistant Chief Constable who said “I’m just Adrian today and these are my two boys”. Top guest though, had to be Jim Knight MP who is Labour MP for Dorset South. He was very interested in the work of the Jennifer Trust and spoke at length with Heather Brown from the Head Office. Ferraris of interest this year were the F40 brought again by Gordon McCulloch (thank you so much for all your hard work) along with his 275GTB/4 driven by his friend John King. The 275 had an unfortunate “fail to proceed” incident during the day when John diagnosed that the fuse to the fuel pump had failed. The car was later returned to the venue and relayed home by the AA. We had a prize draw for the attending drivers which had consisted of two bottles of champagne. One of these was unfortunately stolen from under our table during the day but David Hollinghurst who is the manager of Wyevale Garden Centre came to the rescue with an alternative prize of a spade. The spade was won by Steve Crumpler from Shaftesbury who also claims the honour of being the first man on-site with a Ferrari in the morning. The champagne was won by Gordon McCulloch. Well done to you both. My thanks once again for this year, which saw the overall total that "Ride In A Ferrari" has raised go to over £11,000 in six years of running, to everyone who was involved or who supported a very busy and worthwhile day this year - you all know who you are. The provisional date for next year when David at Wyevale tells me we will be very welcome again, is Saturday 4th June 2005. See you there!
Click here to return to the Ferrari Happenings page.
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