Cool to read about how people got into Cliosport, and great to see you all seem to like it. It brings back hazy memories...
Theres a few real old schoolers on here from what I can tell...there were a few of us on that old email list as I recall, and it turned out that a fair proportion seemed to be from Essex/London. We started meeting up at Southend every so often and we were pleased to get half a dozen of us turning up there, but it was a real big deal as it seemed to be always us lot with our Clios and every time we had a few more Clios turn up. In those days there were really RSC meetings but for some reason we hardly ever saw anything but Clios. Some of you who were in on those early pre-Cliosport things will remember there was a geezer who was in charge of the email list, who occasionally would weigh in and start moaning about what we were chatting about - mainly cos he had fixed it so he got copies of every single email that was distributed and his inbox was clogged up with crap LOL. I cant remember his name, hope hes not on here still...
Anyway, after a while seeing the same people every time, Jas, Mel, Simon, Pele, Leigh, Wongy, Tony and far too many others to list, eventually we thought its high time we did our own thing and kind of branched off from RSC. I already had some content from my old Clio website dedicated to the 16v, Jas was an expert with the computers and I remember us all debating on the old email list about what to call the club cos there were a number of addresses still available.
http://www.cliosport.netwww.cliosport.net got the vote and Jas got the website and club up and running and became chairman - I took events cos thats what I had been doing for RSC anyway in my area - Southend/Essex.
As most of us were still nominally RSC members and Hill Power was having an open day, a whole bunch of us came up from Essex, picking up more Clios on the way and by the time we got to Nick Hills workshops we had around 30 Clios in our convoy - thats probably technically the day Cliosport started signing on members beyond the first few people involved in kicking it all off.
I cant rightly remember how many new members we signed that day, on the promise that the club needed their support and that we would get bigger and better - and that we were not an alternative to RSC but more an organisation just for Clios that could run alongside it. Since then the situation has changed but a lot of us on here have RSC roots if you go back far enough. I dont have many good pictures of the old Southend meets back in the day, but a good one here that always makes me smile when Im leafing through My Pictures - me, Leigh and Adam at Santa Pod, 2000 sometime? Im not sure.
http://www.nick-read.demon.co.uk/Nick Leigh Adam.jpg">
And one of the pre-meeting on Hill Power open day, October 2001, this is Fosse Park in Leicester, I think we got sent packing by an over-zealous security guard in the end...
http://www.nick-read.demon.co.uk/hill power day.jpg">
PS Im pretty sure thats Louise in that picture.