But Dan's experience goes beyond his native shores and Blighty, having spent four years in Australia. Down under, the emphasis is very much on big cc with V8s ruling the roost, and while there is a healthy import and extremely healthy Holder scene, costs were much higher than he was used to. Being a student and not finding well-paid jobs easy to come by, Dan inevitably lost touch with his favourite pastime. That is, until he came over here. "I bought this about two years ago, as soon as I came here," he says, indicating his Tigra. "It used to belong to a friend who's also into speed, but he hadn't done too much with it. All my friends do tuning rather than styling, but a lot of them have more money than I do at the moment and have Skylines and Subarus. I bought the Tigra because, when my friend showed it to me, it was small and tidy and I knew I could do plenty to it.

There's no doubting that he has done just that, as a quick glance at the engine section of the the tech spec reveals, but this is just the latest in a long line of options he's tried, few of them successfully. The first step was the most obvious - wanting big power, the original 1.4-litre Tigra lump was never going to cut it, so it was ditched in favour of the 1.6-litre Tigra engine. While a lot of us would automatically think turbo, Dan was not convinced, not least because he prefers naturally-aspirated engines. "This is not a good engine for the turbo anyway, because it gets too hot," Dan reckons.

So he came up with a plan to up the air and fuel massively with a big valve-and-throttle-body combination. "I never got to drive it," says Dan. "It blew up, so the garage put in an XE engine and started work on that. The pistons and internals took them two or three months, and then the throttle bodies and ECU took another two months." It was taking quite a lot of time and Dan wasn't too chuffed with the end result. "I used it for one or two months, but found there was a problem with oil leaking from the gearbox and it was smoking quite badly from the exhaust," he says. Not good at all. To get to the bottom of it all, Dan finally took it in to another garage. "The news wasn't good," says Dan. The problems was quickly apparent - a cracked cylinder head, which had clearly been on the engine since before it was transplanted. Out comes the credit card again.

By now funds were getting tight. The engine and gearbox rebuild didn't help matters, but Dan still managed to find a way to work through it and come out the other side smiling. "Friends helped me out quite a bit and I got in touch with SBD about tuning parts. They were great, I just told them what I wanted from the engine and they provided the bits," he reveals. Even though London's well-respected Vauxhall tuners didn't do the fitting work, the knowledge and advice passed on proved valuable.