AC/DC frontman and known car enthusiast Brian Johnson has written the following column for The National, the leading English-language voice in the Middle East. An excerpt follows:

"After more than two years on the road with AC/DC, I'm hitting the road again. Well, more like the track than road. We had over five million people come to see the band but I'd be pleased if 500 come to watch me do what I like best: racing.

It's going to be quite a year. My season will start in Florida, where I live.

The first race is the Palm Beach Raceway. I'm going to race the Royale RP4, which is a wonderful British sports racer. It was built in 1971 but it's still very competitive today. It has a 1,600cc engine, and it's very quick.

The races here in the States are to get the juices going, gets me sharp and all of that. Because the summer is when it's going to get fun. I've just bought a 1965 Lola T70 with a Ford V8 engine. I can't wait to get in it. It was a gift to myself; I'd always wanted one. There weren't many of the Mark 1s, there were only 15 made. Six of them have been destroyed and I got chassis number 15, which was the last one.

It was used by Paul Newman as a training tool in the movie Winning. That was used as a camera car also, so it's got some history. It's been raced in California and I bought it from this lovely old gentleman up in Connecticut, who's had it for 30 years. It cost us a lot of money. The guy said, I want a quarter of a million dollars for it, and I thought that's cheap! Usually they go for about $600 000. And when he delivered it and my team boss went up and he said, "Brian, it's the real article, it's genuine, it's unbelievable!" So I went up there and had a look and all there was was this black tub and nine cardboard boxes! So I said, "A quarter of a million dollars for that? Are you nuts?" And he said, "You don't understand, it's one of the last ones." And I said, "Well what are we going to do?" And he said, "We're going to rebuild it, from the ground up, to make it the best Lola in the world."

The plan is to spend the summer in Europe for some racing there and then I'd love to bring it down to some of the Australian vintage racing series."

Read the entire article here.