It’s a grey day at the bottom of the Wirral, the stubby peninsula separating Liverpool and north Wales. The rain is alternating between drizzling and coming down in great lashes as the sprawling vastness of the Stanlow oil refinery comes into view, smoke pouring from its chimney stacks and blending straight into the sky’s greyness.
The conditions, however, don’t seem to dampen Shane Lynch’s energy when he bustles enthusiastically into the gleaming offices at Assetti Performance, the self-described ‘Supercar Centre’ he co-owns in Ellesmere Port. With an emphasis on detailing and upgrading, Assetti is the latest outlet for which Shane can indulge in his love for cars. “It’s mega,” he smiles, his thick Dublin accent prominent as ever, even after half a lifetime spent on the other side of the Irish Sea. “For the love of cars, I can’t buy them all, and it’s a pleasure to come in and see customers’ cars come through the door. I come in every day and smile, walk around that workshop and go ‘f*** yeah!” Indeed, there’s plenty to gawp at on this particular day, including a battleship grey Lamborghini Aventador SVJ that Shane seems particularly fond of.
Most conversations with Shane go like this. He is quick-talking and throws himself into everything he does with a big, room-controlling energy. When you’ve done what he has in life, it comes with the territory. There are two main reasons you’ll know of Shane. One is through motorsport, which we’ll get to.
The other would be if you were anywhere within earshot of Radio 1, or saw an episode of Top of the Pops, between roughly 1994 and 1999. Shane was, of course, one fifth of the vastly successful Irish boyband Boyzone, who racked up six UK number one singles in the late ’90s, with a further 10 making the top five.
It’s almost surprising that it would be singing and not driving that would initially propel Shane to huge levels of fame. While it’s what he’s best known for outside of the little circle occupied by the motorsport community, it’s clear from speaking to him that cars have played an equal if not bigger role in his personal life.
Growing up in Donaghmede, a Dublin suburb, he was surrounded by them from an early age. “My dad was a car mechanic, owned his own workshop that I worked for when I left school. He built hot rods, stock cars, stuff like that… I was going to take over the family business, but Boyzone came in.”
A founding member of the group, at the age of 19, Shane was suddenly a major pop star. It was the late ’90s, and the cultural peak of the clean-cut, fresh-faced boyband. Groups like them were crawling all over the charts, but Boyzone remains one of the ones that everyone remembers, one of a small handful whose cultural significance is still felt nearly three decades on.
So you’re a 19-year-old car enthusiast who’s suddenly found themselves flush with cash. What do you do? “We’d just finished a tour, I was still living in Ireland, and had a good pay check, and went ‘I want a 911’” says Shane. He found one in London, brought it back home, and found that not a single Irish insurance company would cover him – “it wasn’t even a price thing, they just said f***ing ‘no’. So, for the love of cars, I moved to the UK.”
That Porsche would be a special car for Shane – for one, he moved to another country just to insure it. He freely admits that he doesn’t get too sentimental and chops and changes regularly, but that when he sold the 911 a few years later, he cried as it disappeared down his drive with its new owner.
The 911 comes remarkably early in Shane’s car story, which begins with a 1979 Toyota Hilux pickup – “the s***test s***box you’ve ever seen… it spluttered and farted around Dublin town, but I loved that thing.”
The Hilux was followed by a Mk1 Golf GTI that quickly wound up on its roof, and then an AE86 Toyota Corolla. The importance of these little rear-drive coupés to the Irish car scene is vast to this day. “I don’t know what it is, but they’re a big deal in Ireland – always have been, always will be.”
Those two Toyotas would both influence much of Shane’s future car enthusiasm. The Hilux was the first in a long line of pickup trucks, including the Ford F-150 Harley Davidson he won the 2011 Gumball 3000 in and the black-on-black-on-black Mercedes X-Class he’s pulled up in today.
Then there’s the AE86, which has been the backbone of the sport of drifting for… well, ever. It’s probably safe to say that formative driving experiences in the Corolla influenced where he went later. How many of them took place around empty Dublin industrial estates, we’ll never know.
A couple more years into Boyzone’s most successful era, Shane’s love of cars meant he was able to get a foot in the door in motorsport. “It was 1998, and I was given the opportunity to do a celebrity race [in Caterhams] at the Autosport Show. I thought it would your Tim Vincents and your TV presenters like that but no, it was Allan McNish, John Cleland, Alister McRae… I was like ‘f***’s sake, what am I gonna do with this?’”
Shane, who didn’t have his own race suit or helmet at the time, drew names out of a hat to determine grid position, although he’d be starting at the back as the event’s celebrity guest. “Cut a long story short, I went from the back to second place. Flippin’ fluke! The whole celebrity side of things got me into very good positions,” he says.
The surprise success at the Autosport race led to a drive with Ford in rallying, running an original Ka in a national-level rally in Wales. It was a bit of an inauspicious start to his motorsport career, a roll bringing things to a premature end 17 miles into the event. Shane freely admits that he struggled with front-wheel drive (just ask his Golf), and that he was more at home in a car with a loose back end.
Motorsport was never some flash in the pan thing for Shane, though, nor is he one of the celebrities who does it as a hobby, pootling round at the back of the field at the Goodwood Revival. He ran full time in the British GT Championship in 2003, sharing a TVR T400R with sports car hotshot Piers Johnson. The pair came close to taking the championship outright before a crash at the final round at Brands Hatch knocked them down to third in the standings. What really astounds, though, is the sheer variety of racing disciplines Shane’s explored, whether in tests or full-time seats. He’s run Ginettas, Porsches, touring cars, Legends cars (if you’re not familiar with these, go straight to YouTube – they’re hilarious). After Boyzone went on hiatus in 2000, racing was very much his thing.
The crash that ended his championship hopes in British GT in 2003 – a spinning Marcos clipped his TVR, sending it backwards heavily into the tyres – shook him up a little and led to a break from motorsport full time, but it never really went away.
Then, around 2006, it came back in a big way. “I found the world of drifting. I sat with a guy at Silverstone, and couldn’t f***ing believe what this guy was doing in a car. I could drive, and I could go sideways a little bit, but I didn’t know a car could do what this one was doing. It blew my mind.”
Shane was connected to Paul McCallum, owner and founder of Japspeed, one of the biggest suppliers and builders in the UK drift scene (McCallum now co-owns Assetti with Shane). Drifting was his thing for the next decade, with odd wins racked up here and there in the British Drift Championship, before a 2018 Boyzone reunion and then a certain pandemic interrupted it.
“[2023] was the first year I got back to it.” Using a Nissan 350Z, he took part in Monster Energy’s Up In Smoke Tour, a 2500-mile trans-European trip visiting drift venues throughout the continent in an effort to bring the sport back to its roots. “I fell back in love with drifting.”
There’s plenty more on the cards: sat in Assetti’s workshop at the moment is a Vauxhall Monaro VXR, looking menacing in satin black and wearing a set of split Rotiforms. It should have been his next drift car, but life got in the way of getting it built, and he’s had a change of heart: he wants to track down an example of the Monaro’s more workmanlike cousin, the Holden Commodore Ute. Because it was inevitable that eventually, Shane Lynch would try to drift a pickup truck.
Shane is joining us at Caffeine&Machine: The Hill on Monday 4 December for the final ‘I Love You, Man’ of 2023. Tickets are available now, with all proceeds to Shane’s charity of choice.