Project Petrolhead

According to YouTube, I started uploading videos under the “Project Petrolhead” banner in 2023. Prior to this, the idea for this channel had been rattling around in my head for much longer than that, in fact this year marks the 7-year anniversary of the stillborn first attempt at Project Petrolhead 1.0.

To properly tell this story, I need top give you a brief history on a completely different car media company; CarThrottle.

I’m not talking about the CarThrottle YouTube channel that went from basic new car reviews, to constantly purchasing “sh*tboxes” before spiralling off into the monolithic AutoAlex media empire, I’m talking about the original website. CarThrottle launched in 2011 and billed itself as “Facebook for cars” (before everyone realised that “Facebook for cars” is just… Facebook) and based it’s marketing on user-generated content with some professional articles thrown in for good measure, before being purchased wholesale by Dennis Publishing who folded it in with stablemates like Evo and Auto Express.

In 2017, I decided to put up a post on the CarThrottle community area that read:

“Alfa Romeo 147. Should I?

To explain: I am a 19-year-old student with a great appreciation for these babies. I’ve loved Alfa for years and always had a soft spot for their hot hatch 147. So when the time came to choose a first car I jumped at the chance of owning one! Trouble was, I soon saw the cost of road tax (£300) and coupled with Alfa Romeo’s legendary reliability, I was put off on a purely practical standpoint.

The question then. Should I follow my heart and buy a piece of Italian automotive brilliance? Or shall I opt for something slightly… Less potentially problematic (and more boring).”

Okay, have you finished cringing? Excellent. I was serious though. At the time, I was in the middle of taking my driving test and had my eyes open for my first car. Having been told by a certain BBC 2 motoring show that “You can’t be a true petrolhead until you’ve owned an Alfa Romeo” it looked as though their cheapest offering would be the 147, a mid-sized hatchback that competed with the Ford Fiesta and VW Polo. Looking back now, it does seem like a silly idea. The 147 was and is much more expensive to run than either of it’s two named competitors purely due to its meagre choice of engines: for diesel it’s a 1.9 JTDM and for petrol, either the 1.6 or 2.0 TwinSpark or at the top of the tree, the legendary 3.2 litre V6 147 GTA. That didn’t matter to a 19-year-old me however, as I was blinded by a love of naff Italian cars.

The wonderfully naff pre-facelift Alfa Romeo 147 (Later cars were prettier)

My idea was simple. Buy a scruffy diesel hatchback of dubious build quality, start a YouTube channel or a blog (blogs were still a thing in 2017, and no, the irony is not lost on me) and document the trials and tribulations of running such a vehicle on a shoestring budget.

There were, as far as I can see, only two issues with this master plan:

1. A small, Italian, diesel hatchback is not a particularly interesting car to the average person.
2. The hardware store I was working for at the time had closed, leaving me without a job and because I was having to commute via public transport, the money I had saved to put toward a car was quickly evaporating.

Perhaps this is a good thing. I’m a serial hoarder (not to be confused with a cereal hoarder) and I can imagine that, if I’d bought that Alfa way back when, it would have either ended up on it’s roof in a ditch (definitely going to tell THAT story one day) or I would still have it. I may never have bought my beloved Jaguar and I’d probably be even more skint than I am now.

Here’s to you, PPH 1.0, we hardly knew ye.