A BORDON garage will gain a nationwide exposure when its expertise hits the small screen next year.

This summer, Autodan received a “very exciting” invitation to meet TV producers in Manchester.

The production company, Shine North, were in need of a vehicle expert for an upcoming petrolhead programme called Supercar Megabuild, which will be aired in more than 150 countries on the National Geographic Channel next spring.

So Autodan’s managing director, Danny Maines, boarded a train for the

four-hour journey to Salford.

Mr Maines told the Bordon Herald that he was impressed from the very first moment he stepped foot in MediaCityUK, which is also the base for the BBC.

“It is a specially constructed complex for TV production companies to set up their offices and studios, featuring bars, restaurants, landscaped gardens and renovated docksides,” he explained.

“The area is absolutely immaculate with not a trace of litter anywhere.”

Initially, he had no idea what he was going to be interviewed for, other than it was for “a role in a car show”.

However, soon he was fully briefed and pleased to hear that the project was right up his street.

Mr Maines explained that the idea of the show is to take 10 supercars and convert them into something “far more than they were ever intended to be”.

For example, one of the ideas was to turn a Rolls Royce into a drift car for former Boyzone singer Shane Lynch.

All this sounded “fantastic” to Mr Maines who said he was “thrilled” to have been asked, on behalf of Autodan, to project manage the ambitous builds for the show.

Without hesitation, he jumped at the chance and within a matter of weeks his adventure had began.

Mr Maines was assigned his first task on September 1 – to drive a German supercar to Munich to have its engine tuned.

Although in his words, a “fun job”, it also proved a “very hard and tiring one” that requred him to drive more than 10,000 miles within the first two months of the project, nationally and internationally, transporting, towing and testing cars for the show.

As well as crafting the bespoke motor modifications, Mr Maines has acted as a stunt driver, a project manager and a mechanic on the show.

He said that he had fond memories of, for example, driving as fast as he could down German autobahns , while being filmed and racing a Japanese supercar against a German supercar along a runway.

“This has been an amazing project to be involved in, with many challenges to overcome,” he said.

“We have fitted solar panels to the roof of one car, towed a VC10 [a Vickers jet aircraft that weighs nearly 3,000 pounds] with another, modified one of the cars so much it could beat a Bugatti Veyron, turned a highly prestigious car into a hunter’s dream car and created a super efficient hybrid before turning it into a high performance executive office on wheels.

“But the biggest challenge is yet to come.

“The last of the 10 cars is where we take a high-end luxury saloon car and turn it into a snowmobile, with caterpillar tracks, a snow plough and and give it fish-finding capabilities.”

He added that anyone interested in pulling off similar projects would probaly benefit from watching the show when it is aired early next year before breaking out their tools and wielding the spanners.