Jo’s Diary: The rules of modifying your car

I am on my way to Wrocław, western Poland, a place you might not have heard of before. My WizzAir flight tells me Wrocław is a popular destination for both stag-dos and car people. The almost 50:50 split is made painfully obvious by half wearing garish fancy dress, the other half black car-branded hoodies. No prizes for guessing which side of the aisle I’m sitting on.

This is not a random pilgrimage. Every year around this time, 100,000 people from around the world make their way to the scenic Polish city 90 minutes from the German and Czech borders to attend the biggest modified car gathering in Europe. A regular cars and coffee it is not. In little over a decade, Ultrace has grown to be more than just another event on the car calendar: it’s a completely different beast.

In modified car and street culture circles, Ultrace is like a religion and we are its flock. People started queueing in the early hours of the morning and kept queuing under the most unforgiving 35 deg C sun, despite the gates not opening until midday. The same devoted followers willingly stood in line for another six hours just to buy an item of merch from the event. The most literal interpretation of ‘been there, done that, got the T-shirt’.