Looks busy in that header photo, right? It’s for good reason. Dub Club is a weekly evening gathering, and last week was the last one of the year.

Dub Club has been around for years, representing a group of OG car enthusiasts from Coventry, the midlands of England, who facilitate summer car meets. Starting off as a VW event (hence the name), the event grew from what was literally a supermarket carpark gathering to now having its own venue and incorporating all makes and models.

For this final 2022 instalment of Dub Club, the organisers collaborated with Garage Midnight Street Team (GMST) to help host the evening and draw in a larger crowd for the special occasion. GMST, pioneered by our very own Ryan Stewart, is a collection of friends who themselves took up almost a third of the parking space at the venue.

The Dub Club approach to cars is form oriented – low, clean stance with shiny wheels – where as the GMST one is more function based; track day battle scars are welcomed and encouraged here. Put the two together and you’re onto a winner.

A ying and yang of the car world gathered on Wednesday evening after work last week.

Now, the whole Wednesday after work thing is a little tricky for me. You see, the event started at around 7:00pm and I live in South-West London. The journey, during rush hour traffic, can take up to three hours, and I finish work at 7:30pm. I’m no mathematician, but that doesn’t add up. Even if my E38 is designed to make stressful long journeys as easy as possible, this one was pushing it.

I wasn’t supposed to make it to this final Dub Club of the year, but there were a few reasons drawing me to the event. The first one was spuds.

GMST member Harry Sampson is a farmer. A real, proper farmer. He looks after huge fields and gets about on a huge tractor. Harry offered me a bag of his own spuds if I made it to the event, saying he would deliver these spuds in his blue-over-tan 996 Turbo (of course one with an X50 pack.) In hindsight, I should have taken a photo of it…

The second reason is the venue. Dub Club takes place at FarGo Village, which is best explained with a quote from Google: ‘It is a mixture of mobile catering units, small boutique style units housed in repurposed shipping containers, and larger stores surrounding a marketplace area.’

The FarGo Village community is its own living and breathing organism outside of the weekly Dub Club events. It’s awesome; there’s everything here.

My E38 has a tape deck which I’ve been meaning to use, and after months of visiting record stores in London I had no luck finding anything. My last trip to FarGo for Dub Club rewarded me with a used record store that had a cassette rack big enough to fill my whole car.

This time around, I was parked outside a vintage clothing store. I’ve wanted a trench coat for a couple years now, but I’ve not come across the right one at the right price. Until, well… you get the idea.

FarGo Village is not only a fun place to hang out with your pals, but also a dangerously easy place to part with your money.

The third reason for my trip up to Dub Club was my pal Latham’s tacos. ‘Tacos El Pap’ have been a regular sight at car events (and other events) up and down the country this year, and the business really fits in with everything FarGo Village is about. It’s fresh and it’s attractive, with Latham’s taqueria of choice being a 1971 GMC P10 van, naturally slammed on the ground on some static suspension. It’s the perfect caterer for a Dub Club evening.

Initially, I was going with three reasons why I had to attend this event, but I’m a on a roll and none of you are stopping me, so here’s the fourth: The cars.

Dub Club allows anyone to rock up to view the cars, or apply in advance to secure a spot inside the venue. The entry fee is a humble £5 per car, which grants you the ability to show off your pride and joy with the event-goers.

Cars are scattered across FarGo Village upon entry. It’s almost first come, first served here, with the early birds getting put inside the halls where there’s better lighting and it’s nice and dry in case Mother Nature gets in a strop.

I don’t know much about bikes, but this was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard when it pulled out of the hall at the end of the evening.

Amongst the cars inside this hall was a plucky little E36 Compact running a number of aesthetic Racing Dynamics parts, including bumpers and the wing mirrors. The owner, Will Fade, has told me he’s got a whole bunch of additional stuff waiting to go on over winter, including wheels and side skirts.

Dub Club is a great opportunity to check in with what owners are working on, and keeping the engagement and excitement with the hobby nice and ripe heading into the quieter winter months.

Now, those reasons for me to make my last-minute dash from London to Coventry after work are nice and lovely, but I’ve left the fifth and the most important reason till last.

Speaking of Till, my buddy Till Dönnebring came and visited Dub Club from Germany in his van. This Iveco in the middle has everything you need in it to survive a nuclear fallout winter, and, despite being a van, a lot of people found it entertaining and couldn’t help but have a look around inside.

The fifth and final reason I needed to make the journey up were all my pals attending. The cars are great and the venue is awesome, but the social side is the best thing that comes from our hobby. That alone is worth two-and-a-half hours of rush hour traffic after a long day in the office.

For those wondering, I didn’t get home until 2:00am, and I’ll probably do it again when Dub Club restarts in spring 2023.

Michał Fidowicz
Instagram: candyshowroom