Essentially, We are a team of four (Rob, Rog, Shahed, & Will) to be known as “Margaret’s Boys on a Pass” and we have signed up for a “Banger Rally” in September this year. Our goal is to raise £5,000 to share between the local MS centre inHarrowand the Building Fund of St. Margaret’s, our local parish church. We have to “acquire” a car, P Reg or older, for less than £150, fix it up a bit and drive it toNaplesin 4 days. The rally is a properly organised event called “Staples toNaples” and there’s more information about it at www.streetsafari.com.

FatherWill Hazlewood, the parish priest of St. Margaret’s, is a member of our team and before joining the clergy he was a professional motor mechanic and he is certainly still something of a “petrol head”! His particular forte is extremely old and battered SAAB's so we do have technical skills available to us.

We have kindly been donated 3 cars (well, actually we sort of  emotionally blackmailed some very nice people who thought they might get £100 quid or so for them, Thank you we really are grateful). First to arrive was a somewhat aged green H Reg Saab 9000 with 178000 miles on the clock and we had great plans for doing this up and making the trip in it. However, those really nice people from the Nirvanna garage in Iver did us a free pre-MOT check over and suggested we might like to re-consider in the light of being able to see the road through the floor of the boot, the catalytic converter was shot and none of the electrics worked! Then a really nice chap gave us a  K Reg Citroen XM and the really nice people from love Green Garage in Iver (another free MOT – thanks guys!) suggested that it might be more productive to get our heads looked at rather than the one on the car! So we stuck it on ebay and a man came all the way from w:st="on">to buy it! £100 quid added to the fund, thank you Mister Hibbert! (At this point we could be rude about the fees ebay charge to sell a £100 car, but we hear they've got very good lawyers and no sense of humour!) 

Anyway, we then acquired/purloined/blagged a second SAAB, white and in better nick and we are using the first as a donor car.  That's going really well and thanks to the huge generosity of Noel Mcmaunus and the guys at Iver MOT Centre it now has a MOT. If you/your company/employer/ rich maiden aunt would like to pay for either the cost of, 6 months road tax (just over £100) or even the insurance – (we're hoping to get it for about £150) we would be so grateful and we have it on reasonably good authority that even though we can't guarantee anything (being unaware of your track record thus far in life so to speak) your reward should come in another world!

We'll keep you up to date on the mechanical stuff as we go.

We have paid all registration fees for the event ourselves (£250+) and we will pay for all our own living expenses during the event.

One of the ways we intend to generate publicity and gain more sponsors is to circulate a press release to all the local media once we have got the car sorted out  - we have excellent contacts through other events the Church has organised, (e.g. Apple Day.) In the Press Release we will describe what we intend to do, how much money we want to raise and who the funds will benefit. We will also invite the press to a formal “press conference” so if you, or someone you know would like to sponsor us for a really obscenely large amount of money we'll arrange for as much publicity as we possibly can – what a fantastic idea for a commercial body – much better than advertising!

If on the other hand, you could manage to stick your name on the list below with a sponsorship of .50p or even a quid you will be really kind, we will really appreciate it, quite a few people will be really grateful and 100% of it will go direct to our named causes.

Thanks for getting this far – it would be a shame not to sponsor us now wouldn't it!