4,000 miles to the Mississippi Coast: Friendship, cars bring Brit to Cruisin’ The Coast

Martin Bishop, a car lover from England, is at his first Cruisin’ The Coast all because of a Facebook friend request eight years ago.

Bishop, 58, lives in Weston-super-Mare , a small oceanside town near Bristol in England, more than 4,000 miles away from Spring Hill, Florida, where Rick Diaz lives.

Bishop has been a car lover all his life. He fell in love with cars as a kid, especially American drag racing, from watching races on television.

“In the UK, drag racing wasn’t a big thing, so to see something like that was completely different to me. It just inspired me. I couldn’t get out of my head,” Bishop said.

As social media became popular, Bishop started connecting with other car enthusiasts around the world, including Diaz. In 2016, Diaz sent Bishop a Facebook friend request and they bonded over mutual friends and their love of cars.

According to Bishop, Diaz told him if he was ever in Florida, to look him up.

“The following year, we were in Florida and we met for the first time,” Bishop said.

Since then, Bishop and Diaz have met regularly in Florida, going to events like the Daytona Turkey Run , which is a car show at the Daytona International Speedway, and running a Facebook group for fans of cars and drag racing called the Pro Street Brotherhood.

“We’re four and a half thousand miles apart, but our lives are pretty parallel with our interests, even our quirky little things about our family are really parallels,” Bishop said, “I think we just clicked, and that friendship has just grown over the years.”

According to Diaz, when he’s with Bishop and some of the other members of their group, “we’re just one big happy family, and the cars are the common denominator that brought us together.”

In 2023, Bishop decided to ship his 1952 Ford Anglia to the United States for the 2023 Turkey Run and this year’s Cruisin’ The Coast, an event he had never attended. Diaz, who owns several classic cars, had been attending for years.

Bishop’s Anglia was just a shell headed for the junkyard when he bought it in 2007. It took Bishop until 2016 to completely finish the car, building several sections of it on his own. He then raced the car, dubbed “Bad N Blowin” in an English drag racing class called the Gasser Circus.

Bishop says it took about six months to research how to ship the car, which doesn’t meet US emissions standards, from the United Kingdom on a temporary import.

For Bishop though, the hassle seems to have been worth it.

“Day 1 and already [Cruisin’] is just awesome,” Bishop said. “This would blow any big show away in the UK. And I don’t mean that in a detrimental way. It’s just that we haven’t got the following.”

According to Cruisin’ The Coast Executive Director Woody Bailey, Bishop is not the only international guest at Cruisin’.

This year, Bailey says there are 3 registered vehicles from Canada and one from the United Kingdom as of Sunday. More Cruisers will register throughout the week, so that number could change.

In past years, Bailey says Cruisin’ The Coast has seen registrants from Australia, Sweden, Mexico, and Switzerland, among others. Last year, Cruisin’ The Coast had 3 registrants from Canada, one from the United Kingdom and one from Germany.

Diaz and Bishop aren’t the only attendees from their Facebook group. In total, Diaz says there’s about 30 car enthusiasts from the group that traveled to South Mississippi for Cruisin’ The Coast.

“I mean, the hospitality on the coast here is just great,” says Diaz. “The people are just unbelievable. You know, it’s one of the things that brings you back: the people and the food.”

Even though this is Bishop’s first trip to the Mississippi Coast, he and his wife Sandra take trips to the United States every year. He says the friends he makes keep him coming back. He predicts this first trip to Cruisin’ The Coast probably won’t be his last.

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