I bet you rushed down to the paper shop this morning $3.50 in hand to grab a copy of this glorious weekly publication to see how your Weekend Australian Racing Team (WART) did in last week’s Adelaide Rally.
Even if you didn’t, I’m still going to tell you. It was pretty thrill packed. A $320,000 black Aston Martin from the Tour section (no helmets or safety cage) jumped on its lid early on, Tom and Stephen Rogers flipped their Subie into the greenery and our mighty Beemer blew a gearbox (guess who was driving and he didn’t have the initials JC), causing us to lose a day but still come in a respectable 16th.
For car pervs, Alan Jones (the F1 champion, not the radio person) drove a McLaren and James Courtney and Jack Perkins chased in a Lambo, while the very red (except for the black stripes) 2017 Dodge Viper Extreme of John and Janet Ireland won the modern competition and the most photographed car of the event.
Johnny is a serious orthopaedic surgeon with a super blog. In his current writings, Johnny channels our very own ScoMo with a must-read piece: “How Good Are Knee Replacements?’’
The most difficult issue we faced was making the new GoPro Hero 7 work. As you would appreciate, Mick is from a generation where, when you had shot a reel of film, you sent it off to the chemist and four weeks later you got back a big box of 35mm slides.
Friends and readers, how good were slide nights? A group of families would sit around in the lounge room. The blokes would be sinking a few Castlemaine Brown Stouts, the ladies sipping Blue Nun, Black Tower, Gala Spumante or Porphyry Pearl (as the New York Times’s Eric Pfanner commented: “Then came a trio of disasters: World War I, World War II and Liebfraumilch”) and the kiddies would be salivating over the pink lemonades with just a drop or two of brandy to help them sleep. Off would go the fluorescents, a stream of white light shot on to the floral wallpaper and before you could say Bob Menzies up would come a badly washed out image of the family on Betty the elephant at the zoo with at least 30 other punters sitting on wooden seats behind driver Bluey Smith from Carlton who was dressed like Aakkuluk, the Indian mahout.
Anyway, this isn’t our first GoPro. Ever since we’ve raced and rallied together, we’ve had them mounted near the front window and ever since then we’ve got nothing. Last week, Mick thought for the first time we would break the cycle. When he was sitting in the left seat he took personal responsibility and accountability for turning the thing off and on.
As a result, over the five days of the Adelaide Rally we probably lost two hours due to missing the start because he was pushing the on and off button so hard his finger broke the unbreakable GoPro cover, me driving into a group of photographers because he was fiddling with the bloody thing and forgot to tell me the next corner was a hairpin — and because he got so angry he took it off its mounting and threw it at me while the WART machine was cruising happily along Gorge Road at 164km/h, causing the car to drive off into a field where a formerly friendly farmer was tending to his flock of cows or similar big beasts.
Talking of accountability and transparency, I do have to confess that we were unfaithful when it came to celebrating the Sultan’s big seven-oh.
We ditched the Kensi for the Kentish on Stanley Street. Look, if you are thinking of hosting a smoko, bar or bat mitzvah, canasta night or office orgy then the function room at the Kentish is for you. Cosy and romantic, it is an ideal function space for groups ranging from 40-250 people.
We had about 40 of Adelaide and Perth’s most wanted crammed in. We catered for 20, so I think a lot of people were wandering by, saw the free food and drink and dropped in. PS: the bar has Coopers on tap.
OK, let’s run through all the other news.
As we’ve talked about here before, Australia is in recession and the auto industry is the canary.
Dealer Association boss Jimmy Voortman says “the industry is now officially recording its 20th consecutive month of declining new car sales”.
Mazda, Nissan, VW, Honda and Renault sales are down in the teens while Holden, Subaru and Audi sales are off by more than 20 per cent. Holden is down by 28 per cent year to date, with the decision to stop making the Commodore meaning it can’t be too long before Australia’s most iconic brand exits the local market.
In better news, SUVs are outselling electric cars by 37 to one. Go petrol and diesel. In legal news, there’s a sensational legal blue in Brexit land’s High Court. It’s all about a $63m 1962 Fezzer 250 GTO sold by US car collector and investment banker Bernie Carl to UK classic supercar dealer Gregor Fisken in October 2017 minus a gearbox.
Bernie says he wants another $720k for the gearbox. Given Bernie paid $6m for the whole car in 1997, it’s been a nice little earner.
But while a new Feezer 250 GTO was $18,000, by 1969 you could have picked one up for a bit over $3000. They didn’t break a mill till 1986 and took another 28 years to hit $55m.
Bernie’s old car has a serious history, placing second (and first in class) on its first start in the 1962 12 Hours of Sebring driven by Phil Hill and Olivier Gendebien.
Steve McQueen tragics will be interested to know that Steve started in the race in a works Austin Healey Sprite but dropped out with engine problems.
Based on his drive, British Motoring Corporation asked him to race for them professionally but stupidly he chose the low-reward acting caper instead.
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