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A couple of weeks ago (19th July to be precise) I went to the Bug Jam festival at Santa Pod Raceway. Like any other festival in England, there’s (lots of) rain, booze and music – but this one also concentrates on VW Beetles & Kombis racing down the drag track doing wheelies! I’ve always been inspired by the old VWs, so I thought I’d share them with some fellow designers!

The event goes on all weekend from Friday morning to Sunday evening – I only went for the Sunday, and I’m glad I didn’t buy the tickets to camp there for the weekend – it pissed it down almost non-stop! Because of the rain, there wasn’t a single race on Sunday. Although their good attempts to dry the track out, as soon as they finished it rained again (if you’ve ever been to the UK, you’ll know the frustration!).

Anyway, a lot of the events were cancelled, including the racing, monster trucking, motocrossing etc, but that didn’t stop me from dragging my fiancée around to put my new Canon EOS 1000D to good use!

Anyway, I took quite a few photos that day, but I’ve narrowed it down to 20 of my favourites to show you guys! The photos are a bit muddled up, but I’m sure you won’t mind the order

 
This has to be one of my favourite rebuilt bugs I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few!

 
I was lucky to get this one… as soon as it stops raining the bug and hippy van owners come out and wipe there babies dry!

 
A rusty Beetle that always passes it’s MOT (it’s not real rust)!

 
A couple of real rust hippy vans – these ones are the ones that tend to break down but everyone loves them!

 
A couple of well looked after hippy vans!

 
This one is another favourite of mine, it’s called Furbie and I have a photo next to it with my sister when I was about 8 years old – it’s still going!

 
It’s definitely grubbier than it was 10 years ago – still cute though! The rotating key on the back spins when the engine is running…

 
This ones one of my favourite photos from the day – that puddle wasn’t there at the start of the day!

 
The bug on the left is my favourite of the day – it’s just a typical overloaded bug!

 
A couple more…

 
A splitscreen hippy van – I’d kill for one of those!

 
Notice the Fosters beer can on the floor

 
A traditonal VW van before they were all turned in to campers!

 
Had to take a photo of this one: that trailers sure to cause a few crashes on the motorway!

 
This was my fiancées favourite, and it won an award too… (A bit OTT if you ask me!)

 
A ridiculously short hippy van, that must have cost a lot!

 
Couldn’t last the day without at least one macro shot!

 
Just a modern van, but an amazing paint job!

 
I found some graffiti when we were going the wrong way!

 
That’s pretty much it… I was hoping for some cool drag-racing beetle shots with fire bursting out their exhausts but as usual it decided to rain in England – maybe next year eh?

If you fancy viewing the photos again but at a larger size, I’ve uploaded them to my flickr profile! If you liked this post, any retweets, stumbles, diggs etc are more than appreciated! You can also subscribe to the Circlebox Blog feed to make sure you don’t miss future posts like this!