banger race
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: banger races
Etymology: From the slang sense of banger (“an old, worn-out car”).
Senses: examples: text: Trouble began when he moved in permanently after having building work done and set up a banger race track.
ref: 2003 August 31, Renee Mickleburgh, “Lotto lout gives neighbours hell by racing bangers round garden”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: He made his neighbours' lives a misery earlier this year by staging late-night banger races on the three-acre field where he held the bonfire.
ref: 2003 November 7, David Sapsted, “Lottery winner puts 40ft mobile home on bonfire”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: Fed up with Formula One? Rebecca Feiner recommends an evening at the Banger races
ref: 2003 December 6, Rebecca Feiner, “A smashing night out”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: A much-dented Ford Fiesta with broken windows serves as a reminder of the row with neighbours and council officials earlier this year over Carroll's habit of inviting friends round for late-night banger races on a three-acre field he bought at the rear of the house.
ref: 2003 December 19, David Sapsted, “£10m 'lotto lout' arrested in police raid”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: This DVD is a showcase for several of those - including banger races featuring everything from caravans to Austin FX4 taxis via Ford Transits and Reliant Robins.
ref: 2005 December 3, Simon Arron, “Flights of fancy”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: The couple sought action after Mr Robinson's son and his friends allegedly staged banger races in old cars on the land surrounding their own smallholding.
ref: 2009 June 1, “Man called German neighbour Schweinhund, court told”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: Relations apparently became frosty after Hurst complained about Robinson's son's banger races in a nearby field and the family was served with a noise abatement order.
ref: 2009 June 2, Rowan Pelling, “Oh for those days of catfights and sequinned G-strings”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: But reasonable assumptions count for nothing in the world of Ian Brown: he just ploughs through it, with the reckless abandon of a man piloting a battered Datsun in a banger race.
ref: 2009 September 24, Alexis Petridis, “Ian Brown: My Way”, in The Guardian:
text: This is not the late Sixties or early Seventies, but 2011 at Arlington Stadium, near Hailsham, in East Sussex, where perhaps more than 100 classic Westminsters will be ground into scrap metal before the night is over in the most controversial banger race to be staged in England.
ref: 2011 October 1, Rob Daines, “Banger racing: the crashes and the controversy”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: I started going to banger races at the age of three with my dad, uncle and cousin. They're all race bangers and that is how I got into it.
ref: 2012 November 22, Lucy Ridgard, quoting Jade Creese, “The Girls Who Love Smashing Each Other Up In Cars”, in VICE:
text: The contrite duo managed to fix The Overtaker enough to take part in the final event: a no-holds-barred banger race against pro driver Sabine Schmitz.
ref: 2019 June 30, Michael Hogan, “Top Gear, episode 3, review: Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall play wacky races as the show comes back from the dead”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: The craziest, most extraordinary banger race on the planet: 10,000+ miles from Prague to Siberia.
ref: 2020 January 8, Nikhil Krishnan, “Six of the world's most thrilling road trips for 2020”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: There it was pulling out of the repair shed after the mother of all MOTs when a 50-ton juggernaut ploughed straight through the side of it, a smash-up that would grace the most savage of banger races.
ref: 2020 March 31, Matthew Lynn, “Aston Martin not out of the woods yet as outbreak hits”, in The Daily Telegraph:
text: "She gave me pointers on how to drive a Ferrari very fast and hunted me down in a banger race," the current presenter Paddy McGuinness noted on Twitter.
ref: 2021 March 17, Jim White, “Sabine Schmitz: Motorsport mourns the Queen of the Nürburgring who won a nation's hearts on Top Gear”, in The Daily Telegraph:
glosses: A motorsport event in which cars race around a track while trying to damage one another.
Related terms: banger racing