I’ll tell you what, we all dodged a bullet with socialists not getting into power in our great country in what passed for an election this month.
I was out at Eastern Creek this week driving around the track and the grass and the wall in the rain while waiting for my tour of the tip, sorry, waste management centre, when I noticed a few serious cars pulling in to the pits for the “drive your own car afternoon”.
There were no BA Falcon utes, Commodores, Hyundais or even Golfs. But there were 14 Ferraris, three Lamborghinis, two Maseratis, one Aston Martin and some other cars. If Bill Shorten were PM right now the only ride you would be on in the drive your own car day would be a yak.
Then there’s the tip.
Did you know this piece of our great country with an aroma that spreads for 30 suburbs each way is owned by the Suez company. Yes readers, forget the Chinese buying all our farms, mines, office blocks and restaurants, it’s the Frogs we have to worry about. Imagine what they could do when they control all our garbage?
Anyway, keeping with the socialist theme, I want you all to think about buying a Bentley Bentayga. Now, at somewhere between $460,000 and $720,000, this is an SUV that’s within the reach of most punters. With a top speed of 300km/h, the Bentayga is the fastest SUV in the world. I think this is because it has a twin-turbo six litre 12-cylinder engine that makes a mighty 450KW; has more torque than Donald Trump; an eight-speed automatic that drives all four wheels; and does sub four-second zeros to 100km/h.
Because we are not as sophisticated as the To and Froms, we either use SUVs as Mosman, Toorak, Peppermint Grove taxis; grey nomad caravan pullers or tough back-of-Bourke mud pluggers.
In Bentley land they use them for fly fishing. In fact, the descendants of Wocka Bentley have released The Bentayga Fly Fishing by Mulliner. We catch barras, they catch trout.
In the Bentayga, everything is leather. English persons are kinky like that. Most of my fishing gear is in the Esky with the bait and the Tequila.
The bait is for catching the fish, the Tequila is for curing it. Tequila releases the flavour in the fish’s fat cells but Ford is turning it into durable bioplastic material for wiring harnesses.
It is also comforts you if you don’t catch many fish. I don’t know if I don’t catch many fish just so I can have more Tequila or if my fishing technique sucks.
In the Bentayga you get leather tubes for your rods, leather bags for your nets, a burl walnut veneer drawer for your hooks and flies and aluminium cases for the dynamite.
Keeping on the theme of the Toyota 86 Series, the next round of which is only 33 days, 16 hours, 57 seconds and 12 seconds away, at Eastern Creek (visit the Suez tip if you are coming for the series but wear enclosed footwear) my protege Tim Brook is coming second after the first round.
The 86 racing series is the grandson/daughter of relatively cheap one-design racing like the Ford Laser series (Mark Skaife came a good second in these for two years running in the late 1980s but he did better setting a Guinness world record speed for utes in Woomera) and the Barclays TR7 Pro-Car series. Barclays was a cigarette brand and the TR7 was a sports car made by Triumph. The cars featured Lucas (prince of darkness) electrics and world class unreliability. On a German road test, the TR7 started to boil and after 19 days the British Leyland technicians gave up trying to find the cause.
Anyway, everyone is pretty happy we now have a five-race series that is relatively inexpensive (compared to a Bentayga), that is open to new and used cars, that has 40 high school students, pro drivers and enthusiastic amateurs. To put a car on the track is about $70,000 and you could budget $10,000 a weekend to keep it going. Brook was a kart champion, the 2014 Formula Vee champion and now drives the CXC Global (a leading supplier of contingent workforce solutions … mention The Weekend Australian for a super discount on your next solution) Toyota 86.
This is an abbreviated version of the original article. Read the rest at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/a-bentley-designed-for-fly-fishing/news-story/4dbf989b9c2a4134772d94cb2d315370
