English expat to bring ‘very fast cars’ to northern Finland Image

On the phone, there seems little extraordinary about English expat Lee Stoddart. Having lived in Finland for ten years, the 34 year-old pronounces some words as a Finn would . . . but when you meet him, you also meet his car . . .

Lee likes fast cars. And, along with a couple of Finnish friends, he has recently established ” Performance Imports Oy” to bring these boy racers to northern Finland and beyond.

SUBARU IMPREZA WRX STi

In Lee’s Subaru Impreza WRX STi, which looks like a rally-racing car, we drive for almost an hour to an extremely remote converted farm near Temmes, where the company’s cars are stored and maintained during winter.

Lee shows me round the cattle-shed. There are no cows there any more . . . just car piles and piles of car parts which the IT-worker discusses with a cantagious enthusiasm. ‘So here . . . these are pistons . . . these are cylinder heads, gearbox, bodykits, exhaust pipes’ Eventually we stumble upon some old straw.

The guys decided to establish the company because performance cars ‘are so rare in Oulu.’ ‘For example, the Nissan Skyline GT-R’ interjects Lee. ‘A car like that is impossible to find up here.’ But Lee proudly has just such a car, his eyes gleaming like the paintwork of a brand new model just talking about it. ‘It’s GT hifen R’ he stresses.

‘Oh, yeah. You’ve got to get that right!’ laughs his colleague Pekka, 34, a software engineer, the owner of the farm (which has now been turned over to fixing cars) as well as the owner of a nearby garage.

SHARING THE ‘PASSION’

Lee and others wax lyrical about driving fast cars in almost religious terms.

‘Either you’ve got it in you or you haven’t,’ smiles Lee. ‘Some do, some don’t. When you drive a fast car . . . there’s this feeling of being connected, feeling everything, it feels so good to drive! Some people ask why you want a car with that much power and can’t understand, while others just want to get in it.’

Lee enjoys driving late at night – ‘in the summer anyway, when it’s light’ – and particularly in his ‘Skyline’ which he refers to as ‘legendary.’ His friend Toni, a 25 year-old computer game designer, concurs describing ‘just a feeling’ to driving a performance car which is difficult to put into words.

And so, last year, their ‘religious’ enthusiasm for performance cars became evangelical. ‘We have this passion for performance cars and gained a lot of knowledge by maintaining and upgrading our own and we want to allow people to get to see different cars, experience different cars . . .’ explains Lee.

‘And share in our passion for them,’ adds Toni. ‘So they can feel what we feel.’

Having waited for the warmer weather, ‘Performance Imports Oy’ will begin importing fast cars. The first shipment will come, from Japan, this week and will include such models as the ‘Toyota Supra.’ Others  will be imported from the UK. As well as supplying these vehicles, the company will fix the cars, upgrade cars so that they are ‘high performance’ putting in all the new parts that you need if you want your car to go very fast including improved suspension, more powerful brakes and turbo chargers.

OULU PENFRIEND

Lee has always been interested in machines. As a kid, growing-up in Hartlepool in northern England, it was computers. ‘We had a computer since I was five years old’. But, after he learnt to drive, his passion turned to cars. ‘Finally, I got the freedom to understand driving.’

Having studied Computer Science at Teeside University, also in north east England, Lee went into website design and working for various IT companies. But it was in 1995 – when he was still at university – that he first came to Oulu. He met an Oulu woman over Teletext who was ‘looking for a penfriend. I don’t know why but I replied.’ Before long, and knowing nothing about it, he got on a plane to visit Finland.

‘I didn’t even know where it was! I was nineteen when I came to Oulu. I had to get the train from Helsinki, which was difficult in those days because nobody spoke English. I read that the train arrived in Oulu at 7.32am so that’s the time I got off the train and thankfully I was in Oulu. It was dark, it was December, it was minus 30. My knees froze. I was just wearing what I’d wear in the UK for a cold day!’

Lee got to know his new friend and they ‘became very close’ while travelling around the USA together in 1998. The following year, by now in a long distance relationship, they travelled round Scotland. And then, in 2000, Lee moved to Oulu.

‘I sold my guitar for 35 pounds. I had nothing. But this was during the dot com boom and there were companies taking on pretty much anybody, so within two weeks I got a job!’

Lacking a car at the time, Lee would cycle to work in minus 37 ‘That was my personal best! The cold took some getting used to,’ he smiles. He found that people ‘respect people’ more than in the UK, ‘there’s more social cohesion.’ Lee struggles to recall this term. One of the consequences of living in Finland for decade, he says, is losing the more obscure terms in English. Now married to his Finnish penpal, they have two young children: a boy and a girl.

RARE CARS AND SKYLINES

‘There is a market in southern Finland but if you want a performance car in Oulu it’s very difficult,’ stresses Lee. ‘But we will provide these cars and we will let people test drive very rare cars such as Skylines.’ So rare are such cars here that Lee had to drive his own vehicle all the way from England.

The business is based in Oulu itself, only fixing the cars in the heart of the countryside. It is here that Lee, Toni, Christian and Pekka put together and take apart the cars in order maximise performance. They are all self-taught mechanics who have learnt from each other but especially from Pekka – ‘the grand master’ who insists, ‘If it’s an engine, we can make it faster!’

As we drive back to Oulu, Toni rings Lee on his mobile. Apparently, they have got one of the cars they’ve been working up and running. Lee looks quietly confident. For Performance Imports Oy, this is a good start.