It didn’t really need the 10 of you to send me 281 emails, one letter and a call to the newsdesk (hint: never ring the newsdesk, they pretend this section doesn’t exist and they swear a lot) to say I got the price of this extraordinary newspaper wrong.
Let me give you my pitiful excuse. Every Saturday morning, I head up to the local newsagent where I buy all the papers including the Sportsman, Vogue, GQ and a bottle of Powerade ION4 Mountain Blast (complete with four electrolytes to help counter the effects of the sparkling mineral water I drink between sips of Jim Barry’s: The Armagh Shiraz 2009 and didn’t Pete Barry show how good red wine is for you when he punted his beautiful 1970 Merc 280 SL around McLaren Vale in the Adelaide Rally earlier this month). Now all this costs me around $37, so the fact that the suits upstairs jacked the price up 50c without telling me didn’t register. But you have nudged me into asking for a pay raise, which may mean this is my last column.
So, talking of smokes, let’s just be clear. Phillip Morris and British American Tobacco (BAT) are still sponsoring F1 teams. Of course, these days you can’t plaster big Malboro signs all over a Feezer or Lucky Strike across a McLaren. But look for the missionwinnow.com logo. You can follow that link straight to the P. Morris’s “committed to constant improvement” page where the cancer stick makers tell you their purpose is “to transform not only our company but an entire industry for the 1.1 billion people who smoke and those around them”. Our friends at BAT are more straightforward, saying on its abettertomorrow site that its partnership “with one of the most famous names in Formula One motorsport is focused on accelerating our Transforming Tobacco ambition, at the heart of which is our commitment to providing a portfolio of potentially reduced-risk products”.
Of course, the directors of F1, Feezer and McLaren can rationalise this disgrace and the fact that each day in the US alone about 2000 people younger than 18 years smoke their first cigarette and each day, more than 300 people younger than 18 years become daily smokers. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that if smoking continues at the current rate among US youth, 5.6 million of today’s Americans younger than 18 years of age are expected to die prematurely from a smoking-related illness. This represents about one in every 13 Americans aged 17 years or younger who are alive today.
Moving on to less bad news, our favourite company, Hagerty (it’s purpose, the same as ours: Hagerty Exists to Save Driving … imagine a world where there’s nothing on the road but self-driving, robot cars. All driverless. All the time. Is this the future? Not on our watch), has just published its bull market list. It names the cars “we believe will gain the most value over the next year”. Friends and readers, can you believe what the lads and lassies at Traverse City, Michigan have done? For the first time it has put a motorcycle on its list! My boss and our cafe reviewer John Lethlean and some other temporary Australians may be cheering, but what sort of lead does this provide for the kiddies? Soon they’ll be asking Santa for two-wheel toys rather than four. Trust my word, it’s a very slippery slope from there. Next stop tatts, leather, chains, a Fat Boy Harley, membership of Hells Angels and before you can say midlife crisis, little Rainbow or Indigo has turned into an investment banker.
Anyway, Hagerty tips the 1994-1998 Ducati 916 as a sure thing. “Penned by the ‘Michelangelo of motorcycling’, Massimo Tamburini, a one-time air-conditioning-duct maker who never went to college, the 916 ended the era of the plastic bullet by granting slit-skirt glimpses of the machinery within. It launched the modern trend of semi-naked superbikes as cyberskeletal thrust rockets, the 916’s sassy underslung tailpipes a brazen feature now relentlessly copied.” After reading that, I feel a bit hot and bothered myself. Around $15k-$20k.
Proper transport on the list includes the 1997 Dodge Viper GTS (about $70k in the US, about $100k here), 1998-1991 Honda CRX Si (upwards from $20k), 1997-2001 Honda Integra Type R (about $20k) and the 1976 Porker 914 (somewhere around $30k).
Talking of old cars, in November BMW began a voluntary recall of BMW E46 3 Series cars, produced between November 1997 and June 2000, because the airbag could kill or injure you. The ACCC say owners should stop driving their vehicle immediately and contact their local BMW dealership or call BMW Australia’s Takata Hotline on 1800 243 675 to organise their free vehicle inspection. While BMW are meant to offer you a loan or hire car while the bag is replaced, there are no bags so the company should offer to buy your car.
A lot of readers have had varying experience with this ranging from excellent in Adelaide to really bad treatment in other places. We’re trying to get to the bottom of your rights here, but Crikey’s David Hardaker has been doing a great series of investigative pieces on BMW and Toyota and airbags.
Two Australians have been killed by airbags and others seriously injured. Two years ago, a woman lost an eye and suffered brain damage when a piece of airbag shrapnel flew into her eye in a low-speed crash. Hardaker revealed last week “there were a further four Takata incidents, at least, which car manufacturers had apparently withheld from the ACCC and which only became known after the ACCC used its compulsory information gathering powers” and that the “ACCC and DIRD had agreed to a request from BMW to keep quiet about a serious incident involving a faulty Takata airbag which had been removed from an ageing BMW”.
Things are not going well in the top-end-of-town car auctions, with RM Sotheby’s first-ever auction held in partnership with F1 at the Abu Dhabi GP selling only 50 per cent of cars offered. Maybe it was because the sale started at 9pm, or Abu Dhabi is a bit out of the way, but a one-off 2017 Pagani Zonda Aether went for a record $9.9m and Michael Schumacher’s title-winning 2002 Ferrari sold for a final $9.6m. Have a great whatever you celebrate and if you recover, see you next Saturday.
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