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Name: Ian Stent

Occupation: Journalist

Background: I've had an unhealthy obsession with kit cars since the mid '80s when I first stumbled across a kit car magazine with a Cobra replica on the cover. I was hooked.

By 1990 I'd given up a potentially sensible career and joined Filby Publishing, a small publishing company in Reigate, Surrey which produced a magazine called Which Kit?. Subsequently building a Sylva Striker and Hawk (Transformer) Lancia Stratos replica, it was 1994 when I first drove the original Car Craft Cyclone prototype for a feature in the magazine. It was immediately apparent that the Cyclone was the most capable and rounded kit car I'd ever come across.

I still owned my Stratos at this stage, but it was on borrowed time. When I drove the turbo-charged version of the same car a year later, that was it. The Stratos went, I was in the money, but I didn't have the time to build a car and I also wanted a top job (which I wasn't convinced I'd be able to achieve myself) so I asked Car Craft to build me my first Cyclone, complete with Calibra Turbo engine. It was utterly superb, save for a troublesome turbo that I never managed to get running without using a small amount of oil. Eventually sold (I can't remember why, but probably to use the cash for something mundane), it was only a year or so later that I bought another car, this time a privately built example with a bog standard 1.8-litre Astra engine, complete with injection. A lot less power, but every bit as good in other ways.

I owned this second car for another year or so before it too was sold... and I've regretted both sales ever since!

In 2007 I bought Which Kit? magazine with my business partner Justin Williams and we set up Performance Publishing to produce it, quickly changing the title to Complete Kit Car, which I now edit, ably assisted by fellow journalist Adam Wilkins.

This site has absolutely nothing to do with Complete Kit Car. This is a completely personal indulgence, using my own photographs, memories and some of the official pictures from the CKC archive.