my normally mundane monday morning got off to horrifying start today. getting up for work and i receive a phone call from a work mate saying "the fu*king place is on fire". instantly i hung up bailed into the car and broke every limit on the way there. i work in a big MOT/bodyshop garage with a whole load of cars in it, some customers and some owned by owner and workers, so all i could think of was how bad it could possibly be. once i arrived there were 6 fire trucks and even more police cars on the scene.i personally didnt have that much of value inside other than a load of tools and my 2 mk1 golfs, one of which had just been fully restored. i was more worried about my friend as he has got an expensive collection af cars including a low milage, absolutely mint 3door RS cosworth which is like his failsafe. he basically lives for cars and has his bank balance in cars, somewhere plus of £50,000, the 3door cossie worth £12,000 alone luckily there was no one at work yet, so the firemen entered and tackled the blaze opening the two front shutter doors to let the smoke out. slowly as the smoke cleared we could see the extent of the damage. somehow the fire had started dead central in the unit managing to spread in a circle and totally destroying 6 cars and damaging many others.

cars destroyed were:

3 door cosworth (original condition)
rwd saphire cosworth (huge amounts of tuning)
vauxhall tigra (with extensive work carried out body and engine)
ford orion (nothing special just a reliable daily)
Evo 3 (running 380bhp)
Suzuki SJ (awesome offroad vehicle with much work done to it)

cars damaged were:

ford granada 2.8i ghia x (mint condition)
another rwd saphire cosworth (original condition)
customers ford fiesta (slighly melted plastics)
mk2 golf gti 16v (water damage from firemen)
many other cars have paintwork damage from hot ash and debris etcthe above picture was the 3dr cossie. as you can imagine my friend was distraught.it seems as though the tigra parked in the middle somehow caught fire first and it then spread from there, luckily it didnt reach the paint mixing table or the 4 large gas bottles that power the oven. it also seems that iam the lucky one aswell as nothing of mine was damaged but then i feel bad for my friend as i would rather my stuff burnt than his cars. luckily (but not really) only one customer car was damaged and he is more of a friend and the place is insured so we should recouperate some of the losses at least.

it has been on local news today and will be in the local papers tomorrow.

all in all i have had the shitiest day ever!!

Thats proper gutting man! Sorry to hear about the damage to your mates stuff aswell! Massive shame that! Especially that Evo3!!!

dude.
glad nobody was hurt.

suppose thats a small mercy.

dawm! that is a really unpretty sight

especsially for the evo 3 and the cosworth's, maybe the engines are still salvable?

how did it just set on fire that really strange. at least no one was hurt

according to the fire investigator dude somewhere in the dash of the tigra started the fire. none of us can quite understand as the car was used yesterday and put in the garage at about midnight-ish but the firemen say the fire started early this morning at about 7.30 - 8. so the car would of stood for at least seven hours before somehow spontaneously combusting!! i just dont get it!!

thats a damn shame for the cossies etc.

but that 7:30 thing, its possible seeing as it does seem a big building that it started small not long after it was parked up and took those hours to get massive and start engulfing more. who knows

Hopefully the insure covers it all but some how i fear some ones going to come out short changed..

shit. some nice cars there

and i doubt it would have slowly burned, cars interiors, (plastics/fabric) tend to burn like nothing else, once they are up, normally nothnig to stop them. lol

Oh my god, that's awful. I don't know how I'd cope with news like that either, I feel sorry for your friend.

It's probably why cars in a lock-up should have their negative battery lead disconnected, but then again nobody would expect a Vauxhall Tigra to catch fire on its own accord in such a short amount of time.

its pretty lucky it didnt get any worse because hes got plenty more nice cars. his mercedes cosworth was only about 2 metres away from the tigra and didnt suffer any damage. also the cars parked to the left side are backed up against a wooden wall which luckily didnt catch fire as all the customer cars are on the other side. he also just sold his skyline which hes thankful for because that would of been in the row next to the cossies.

That is gutting news mate. I am absolutely gutted about the RS though.

I hope the insurance pays out there Mate, Thats terrible, at least no-one was hurt.

Really sorry to see this happen to you dude.Hope Insurance do thier job properly-Im glad no one was hurt.

Always horrible seeing things like this. Remember the collapsed barn incident a couple of years ago? Several very rare cars (from memory including an RS500 and Escort Cosworth...perhaps a Lotus Cortina, too?) crushed in that one

cheers

James