OTHER: The Cars of Sweden & My first Mantorp Park experience

Since i have a lot of family, friends and relatives in sweden it’s kind of a tradition for me to go there at least every second year to visit all of them. It’s also tradition to go there by car. While it’s not the most confortable way it’s definetely the most fun way to get there. On the way to my final destination around Västerås in Västmanland, i like to stop once or twice at a camping place (usually at a place i haven’t been before) to explore new places. Well and since we made 4500km’s in two weeks i thought the mazda would be the best choice of car and it defintely was. what a great, comfortable, smooth and spacey car!

Since my girl isn’t too much into cars i thought i don’t want to plan the whole vacation around car events. We had planned the date of vacation early due to our work schedules and when i asked around if there are any cool events going on i only got one answer. The power big meet (see later). However nothing JDM related. I figured out i was twoo weeks to early for the annual Gatebil event at Mantorp park and nothing else to see, so i thought i just skip everything car related and if it fits into our tight schedule of visiting relatives and enjoying ourselves we might have a short sneak in at the power big meet. Well…
And then we followed my mazda’s navigation to my parent’s new place in sweden which led me a bit of a strange (but probably the fastest) route to that area, and suddenly i saw a sign at the road: Mantorp. Our brave mazda led us there, hehe 🙂

I have never been there before because i usually go to different areas in sweden but since the gate in the back was open i just HAD to have a look. It was already late in the evening and just a regular saturday or so, so there was no action going on but at least on the parking area a few guys were packing up their race cars:

You might know that scandinavians have incredible backyard-engineering skills and build world-class racecars on a budget…

We sneaked around a bit but decided proceed to our destination.

At my parents place i checked the mantorp website to figure out that every first monday of the month there is a public trackday. I din’t have any helmet or fire-proof suit with me so i wouldn’t be allowed to race but i thought yeah – maybe more to see then, right? As it was only a 1hour detour to our next destination i thought why not drive by on monday and have a look? that’s what we did:

unfortunately again there was not too much going on. a small group of porsche and corvette owners were racing around on the track.

and then there was this little guy too 🙂

after a few minutes of wandering around we decided to have a look at the paddock area:

it was less spectacular than expected. but hence beeing a monday morning i guess most of the cool cars would probably come in the afternoon…anyhow. after a while we saw these guys unloading a pretty serious time attack corvette:

It was surprisingly quiet on the track but seriously fast 🙂

these guys also had this cool motor-powered mini-car to drive around the paddock 🙂

otherwise there wasn’t too much to see. at least one fairlady in the paddocks

and later on the track.

accompanied by this Scirrocco R:

After a while we decided to move on with our roud trip and on our way out of the area i pointed my camera into the two workshops which had open garage doors in the pit-area. one seemed to be a serious race-shop.

The other one was a radical dealer and Formula car trackday rental / racing school shop:

on our way out i couldn’t refuse to force my girl to make a picture of myself driving out the driveway (it’s not the track unfortunately) of Mantorp park. I swear next time i’m in sweden i will try my best to get to the gatebil at Mantorp!

However in västeras there is this thing called “Power big meet”. It’s worlds biggest US-car / Rockabilly Meeting. Seriously it is! people come there from all over the world and sweden has a crazy amount of american sleds and muscles. So during the two weeks in sweden we saw at least 30 (really!) or so american classics on the road every day. some of them seemed to follow us the entire two weeks 🙂

I thought it wouldn’t be too interressting to me, but as closer as the event came (and we even passed the city of Västeras one of these days) i regretted to not have planned to go there as there were so many cool people and cars driving around on the street and i would have loved just to have a look at a different car culture for fun. Well that was it. on our way back we saw a bunch of mazda MX-5 roadsters in The city of Roskilde, some of them seemed to be quite a bit modified 🙂