MOTOR racing fans with cash to spare were soon off the grid at an auction at Grove to stake their claim for unique car number plates with attitude.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, which has three million unreleased registrations, holds regular auctions of personalised plates, and the popular events raise about £5m a year for the Treasury.

Among the latest batch of 14,500 plates put under the hammer was a unique selection of F1 prefixes, an obvious draw for Formular One racing fans.

As a timely curtain-raiser to this year's Formula One racing season, with the venue at the prestigious headquarters of the WilliamsF1 team, the auction attracted serious aficionados.

One visitor, Rav Dhuna, from Hayes, Middlesex, parted with almost £28,000 for four plates after bidding from the floor with metronomic regularity.

Mr Dhuna, 31, who runs a high-performance car rental business, said he would keep two registrations, F1 FAN (£5,700) and F1 ACE (£7,000), to put on two of his firm's cars, and sell on the other two, F1 NUT (£5,900) and F1 GPX (£3,000), at a profit.

"You don't have to have the latest particular model to put these sorts of plates on," he said. "Even a car that is four or five years old looks fantastic wearing one of these."

Another successful bidder at the three-day auction was Michael Drury, from Verwood, Dorset, an engineer and inventor who has long links with the Williams team and travels all over the world with them.

Mr Drury, middle name Andrew, said that as nicknames were more commonly used among the motoring fraternity, rather than first names, his choice of F1 MAD, costing £6,000, was just up his street.

Mr Drury, 51, said: "It was a brilliant result. It was so cheap it just isn't true - I was prepared to bid much more than that. Now I'll have to buy a car to put it on!"