‎٧‎ ‎ط ع ل‎ / 7 LET

McLaren 570

570S Spider, 2017–2021

I'm going to take a hiatus now, i might potentially (but unlikely) even quit uploading on the site permanently due to a variety of reasons.

1. Lost of interest in car spotting.

2. It's fairly time consuming to upload photos after photos. Time that could've been spent otherwise.

3. General lack of support and interest i gather. Because this site's community is Euro-centric, spots of cars with Gulf plates are always going to gather more interest in Europe than in it's home region. This is understandable and it's largely my fault but it's also annoying when your spots gets ignored because someone else saw a Range Rover with Saudi plates in London.

4. As a result of the Euro-centric community, Bahraini, Qatari and Saudi galleries are very much dead. No active user on PM happens to be from there aside from me. Not to sound like i'm bragging but it feels like i'm single-handedly keeping them alive. It's even worse on the Bahraini side because sightings of such plates are much rarer outside of the region. This alongside the 3rd point just makes me feel like i'm talking to a brick wall in the middle of the empty quarter. UAE doesn't suffer from this issue, mainly because of it's Eastern-European population.

5. Local culture issues: People in the GCC are generally more private-orientated, culturally. This means that car spotting would potentially cause awkward issues with car owners. I already had two car owners find out about my PM uploads, but while they were fine with it, others would likely demand me to take them down. Tihs happened with me countless times on Instagram before and is one of the main reasons why i've been mainly focusing on car meets over the last few years.

Not to sound corny but i thought i would end this talk on a more positive note. I mainly joined the site because i'm into cars, liked spotting and started getting into plates but also because i wanted to show the cars in the region from a different perspective. A perspective that's far more relatable, down to earth (ironic given the McLaren in this post) and often over-shadowed in favour of the usual "arab supercars in Dubai/Paris" trope that it ultimately made me lose interest in modern supercars itself. Sure, a 1990 Toyota Cressida for most people is as exciting as a dry wall-coloured 90's microwave but to me, it represents 80's-00s era Gulf in a way that Future Boy Conan, bootleg PlayStation games and Majid Magazine does. It's a reminder of a different time; be it politically, culturally or economically, for the better or worse. Now whatever i successfully did that or not is irrelevant, as i ultimately enjoyed my time being here regardless. I would probably still stick around and in few weeks, even continue uploading some of the more interesting cars i personally find.

Until then, happy new year (although i personally don't celebrate that).

Bahrain
2024-12-20

 Other photos of this license plate:

cabriolet