Brian and Cheryl Illman are getting ready for another banger rally trip. This time, they’re driving to Romania in a Toyota Yaris that has been transformed into the Pizza Planet truck from Toy Story.
The couple are doing the Romanian Route, a popular rally that sees participants travel through five different countries on their way to Bucharest. But, they’re not just doing it to meet up with friends, they’re doing it to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital.
It’s a charity that is close to their hearts. Brian himself had testicular cancer and underwent major surgery, and the couple now want to raise money in their banger to support children with similar conditions.
“I’ve been through one operation, two chemos and then was really poorly”, Brian said.
“Just meeting the young people, as an adult, you sit there like, I don’t know how to say it without being morbid, but I feel like as much as I want to be around for my kids, I thought to myself at the time, ‘I’m in my forties, I’ve had my life’.
“But when you see really young people going through the same thing I was going through, at that moment you start really being humbled and thinking ‘I’m old. If I fight it, I fight it. It’s brilliant, but these people ain’t had their life yet’.
“When you start looking into the resources and what Great Ormond Street does, and are trying to do, as adults and a family, it was just absolutely terrible to go through, and I couldn’t bear the thought of us going through that with one of our kids. It’s just heartbreaking seeing it, and you just want to do something.
“I’m lucky enough, I survived, we’re getting stronger every day.”
Choosing to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital
This will not be their first banger rally. Both Brian and Cheryl have done others in the past, including the Original Route in 2019, but this time they’ve changed the charity in which they will be raising money for. Sterling Insurance has donated to their cause as well as contributing to fuel money for their trip.
“We went with MacMillan at first (for previous rallies)”, Cheryl explained.
“But after the second lot of cancer, that’s when we really saw the younger children.”
“And it just changed us as people”, Brian noted.
“I know it definitely changed me. It humbled me loads. Before, I used to be like everything’s got to be done now fast, and I’m so humbled now that if something major happened, I just sit there and you (pointing at Cheryl) still stress about things, and I just sit there and go ‘It’ll be alright’.
“I’ve got no urgency or don’t worry about anything. Just normal things, like the car will break, and I’d be like ‘Yeah, it’ll fix’”.
And Cheryl was keen to stress that their kinship with Great Ormond Street was a lasting one.
“If we were to do another one after this, we’d probably still go with Great Ormond Street”, she said.
“Just because it is really close to our hearts, and it’s something that we would really like to put into.”
“I think it’s one of them things, as an everyday person, when you haven’t gone through something, you don’t really notice it,” Brian added.
“But when you’ve actually gone through something that bad, you start noticing it, and you know how it affects you as a person and affects you as a family. It hits home really.
“I couldn’t imagine having to go through that with any of my kids, and if I did, I’d be grateful that there’s something like Great Ormond Street to be there to support.
“It’s not just cancer at Great Ormond Street, it’s a lot of different illnesses, and without hospitals like that, what would we do?”
To infinity and beyond with their Toyota Yaris
The duo are ready to take on their next banger rally challenge in their acquired Yaris, which has been excellently transformed into the Pizza Planet truck from the iconic Disney franchise Toy Story. They still need to add new brakes and let it have a major service, but they are basically packed ahead of the trip in August.
This was a trip they were meant to do before Brian became ill, and even while he was recovering, before Cheryl booked it as a birthday present. So after putting it on hold, they are ready to tackle the journey.
But it was while Brian was in hospital that he got the idea to do a banger based on a children’s film.
“We was on the chemo ward, and we met quite a few young people and a few teenagers”, he said.
“I was really upset that I lost my beard and my hair, and when I met and saw some of these teenagers and like just the loveliest people. I just thought to myself, ‘I can grow my hair and beard back.’
“Just seeing them, we started doing a bit of research, and I realised that Great Ormond Street is trying to make a new cancer unit, which supplies a lot of resources.
“Because we was going out for kids (for the banger rally), I said to her, ‘We’ve got to do a sort of Disney-inspired car or something like that.’
“So I started to research a lot of the other rallies, and most of them have been done, like Lightning McQueen, Mater (from Cars). I was going through them all, but I never found one Pizza Planet on the whole internet.
“So I was like ‘I’m going to go and get something massive and do a massive Pizza Planet truck’.
“Where I’m an ‘80s and ‘90s kid, I see a Yaris, and I was looking at it, and I normally build things in my head very quickly. It had the right shape for what I needed, and it was a Toyota.
“I used to play with Micro Machines cars, so I’m going to do a Micro Machines version of the Pizza Planet truck.
“My head’s kind of crazy, it just adds it all up together. I’m building it before I’ve even picked the car up.”
Brian could not wait to get started on his idea, so much so that he decided to drive from Ipswich to Norwich at 10 pm to pick it up from the owners. By the time he and Cheryl were on their way back home, he was already ordering parts.
“My little boy loves it. He’s only six. I picked him up from school in it, and he keeps saying to me, ‘I’m the coolest kid in the school. Can you come and pick me up? Mummy’s car’s boring’”.
The plan for the car has been nearly a year in the making. But it was much to Brian’s surprise that it coincided with the release of Toy Story 5 this summer. And although they haven’t seen the film yet, they plan on doing so before the rally.
“We planned it from August to September. We kind of knew the theme, knew what car we were getting. And then one of my boys text me. ‘Dad, guess what?’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Toy Story 5’s coming out next year’. I was like ‘Shut up’, and then I quickly went on the internet and looked. It’s dropping in June, a couple of months before the rally.
“It’s basically free advertising because people are going to fall in love with the film again, even though it’s an iconic film. I’m 44, and I remember Toy Story growing up. My kids remember Toy Story growing up. It’s hit every generation, and obviously it’s been in every single film apart from two Disney films as like an Easter egg somewhere.
“I was just like McDonald’s is going to go mad, all the toy stores, all the supermarkets are going to go mad for Toy Story, so it was just perfect.”
Working on the Yaris before the banger rally
The car itself has been turning heads locally in Ipswich. Just before talking to us, he even got a double-take from a police car on his way home from work. The Yaris has done a whopping 165,000 miles and has had a lot of work done on it to prepare for the mammoth journey it’s about to embark on.
It will have brand new tyres (along with taking three spares) added to the new brakes before they leave for France, where the rally begins.
“It’s already at the end of its life”, Brian tells us.
“Just to even get it through the MOT, it was ‘Yeah, I’m going to have to do that, that and that’. So, I’ve done all the work that I needed to do, and then we got it through the MOT. I had to do the windscreen because that was cracked as well.
“It’s actually like a collector’s model. It’s a Toyota SR, so people actually collect them. But that one was a bit battered and dented, but it had the original alloys.
“So I sold them to buy the brand new tyres to go on steel wheels, so a few bits have paid for themselves. It’ll make it.”
“We’ve never not made it”, Cheryl was quick to say.
“Don’t jinx it”, Brian joked.
Banger rallies are often a superb way of ticking off many cities and countries in Europe, and this one is no different. Along their route, they will go through France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and finally Romania.
“You kind of forget everything. Like your worries”, Brian noted.
“You’re just so fixated on doing your challenges, getting to the next destination, and then you just have that release at nighttime, having a laugh with everyone. Then it’s intense in the morning again.”
“It is so much fun, but it is a tiring journey”, Cheryl was quick to add.
“He calls it his holiday, and I’m like, that really isn’t quite a holiday. A holiday is where you go and relax, but you don’t get time to relax there. It is always on the go, but it’s worth it because it is really great fun.”
“I think the journey home is harder than being on the rally because it’s intense driving”, Brian said.
“You’ve got five days to do that rally, and even though it’s intense days and it’s long hours and big miles, when you’re coming back, and you’re breaking it into three, you lose a lot of the scenery because it’s a lot of highway and motorway driving.”
Why did they choose to do the Romanian Route banger rally?
So the big question is, why the Romanian Route? There are, of course, plenty of others to choose from in Europe.
“I’m quite adventurous. Even when we go on holiday, I’m always just wanting to go out and see stuff,” reveals Brian.
“I talked her into the Barcelona one. I said to her, ‘It will be sunny, it will be lovely. Yeah, I finally got her out on that one, and then I think she hated it and loved it at the same time. And then kind of got the bug for it, and then they were doing an Original route the next year, which was a 10th anniversary.
“So we booked it, but unfortunately I got ill, and then we cancelled it, and I came out of hospital. We had about two months to get it sorted. I said to her, ‘Let’s just do a quick, easy car and just get out there’. We did that one, which was just brilliant. And that night when we finished, I think it was a little bit too much drink and the atmosphere got us, and we’re like ‘Let’s just book the biggest one and longest one’.
“But, unfortunately, we’ve had two years out, so it was as soon as I could get back to some kind of normality, let’s just go and do it.”
“It’s good fun. I don’t personally like the mountain passes and things like that, but all the rest of it and the scenes are fantastic. And the people that do it,” Cheryl pointed out.
Brian responded: “The thing is, the first night can be sort of getting to know everyone, but once you’re there, it’s like you become one massive family, and then you kind of forget that you live somewhere else.
“Just for the four/five days, you forget about everything else, all your normal life. You absolutely just get stuck in, and it’s like a different kind of world.”
And it’s clear that Brian and Cheryl have made some good friends during their time doing banger rallies, as Brian pointed out.
“When I was in hospital, and things were going a bit bad. It was the messages and support from previous rallies, all the way back from 2019 and all the way through. Even when I’m coming out, some people are just ‘Oh, if you’re going, we’re coming’. They’ve booked (the banger rallies) as we’ve booked.”
The Pizza Planet truck is now a local ‘celebrity’
Participants are usually advised to scrap their cars once they finish the rally and fly home, as it’s the easier option, but Brian can’t seem to let that be an option.
“I get kind of attached to the cars, unfortunately. I can’t let them go. If they make it there, I just can’t let them go. I need to bring them home and enjoy them a little bit longer.”
“I think the car’s kind of famous around Ipswich now”, Cheryl proudly revealed.
“Really quite famous where you’ve been to the car shows. Loads of people just absolutely love the car.”
“It does bring joy to people. It’s actually quite cool because I’ve been using it as a daily to go to and from work and shopping”, Brian proudly answered.
“You see people on their way to work, they’re just walking along with like just a normal moody face, and then the car drives past, and I watch in the mirror, and you see them all of a sudden go from moody looking to a big smile as it drives past, which is brilliant. That’s what I love about them, they do bring joy.”
Brian and Cheryl’s love of banger rallies is evident throughout our chat with them, so much so that they’re already thinking about which rally they’re going to do after August’s adventure, as Cheryl explains.
“When Brian gets out there and because we all meet up every single night because you do your daily challenges and you score your points and things like that. I know on the last night there will be a whole group of them picking which one they’re going to do next, and because there’s still some we haven’t experienced, like there is a Scotland one.”
“The different countries you go through. One minute you’re in one country, next minute you’re in another one, next minute you’re in another one. It’s absolutely bonkers”, Brian said.
Insure your banger for a banger rally
If you’re thinking of going on a banger rally, you will need to make sure you have the right insurance to keep you covered during your adventure.
That’s where the banger rally insurance experts at Sterling Insurance can help. They can organise a policy starting from £95 for seven days. Call 0344 381 9990 for a swift no-hassle quote, or book a callback at a time better suited to you.