Great to see so many of you last Sunday at the Marulan Cheap Car Challenge 4 Hour Enduro, with one hour off for lunch in the track’s cafe, which has the best old-fashioned hamburgers in the world. First off, they are all home made. Second off, the bun is about three times the size of those in the Scottish fast food joints, and thirdly it has every food group known to man, woman and person.
Anyway, among the readers out to watch the 25 cars built between 1986 and 2004 doing 255 laps around the very technical track was Bruce from Robertson. Bruce came because he believed I was a schoolboy friend who he thought died 45 years ago. He was disappointed when I wasn’t the friend and I wasn’t dead. Ian from Sydney told me he worked at Google and his claim to fame was that he had convinced his nephew’s primary school class that when they asked Google questions he was the one that answered them all. Then there was Noreen who came all the way from Goulburn (30 minutes’ drive), thinking The Weekend Australian Racing Team (WART) would be putting on free lunch and giving away the free Australian pens that don’t work. She went straight home when she found out neither was on the cards.
I have had a few emails through the week about how WART went. Can I say winning and losing is just a patriarchal construct aimed at entrenching the values of a capitalist society on its citizens. Tom Connolly, Lachie Mansell (I begged him to change his name to Nigel on the day to give us some badly needed cred), Gene Alexander and I qualified seventh. In the actual race, some people won and others competed well.
There were no prizes for best-looking car but I gave the Singleton Moore Signs Peugeot 206 the chequered flag despite being French (the car; the drivers are from Sydney’s Shire), followed by the Shane Fowler Signs, the Phil Alexander-prepared WART Nissan Pulsar and then the Infinite Racing Mirage. The Mirage (originally produced between 1978 to 2003 — don’t pay more than $800 for yours) was the pride of energy, metals, machinery, chemicals and living essentials conglomerate Mitsubishi Corporation at the time. In producing the Mirage, Mitsubishi was guided by its mission of “Global Understanding Through Business Ritsugyo Boeki” which is why the Mirage was probably named after what the dictionary says is “something illusory, without substance or reality”.
To their great credit, Infinite Racing’s team members choose the 1.5 litre model to ensure they had no advantage over most of the other cars, which were 2 litre models. The Mirage made up in style what it lacked in speed by adopting a postminimalist look, blending the standard white body paint with a big number 14 artistically rendered in black Texta on both sides.
As you would expect, our campaign had its usual trials and tribulations. At practice on Saturday a kangaroo suddenly jumped on the track in front of the mighty Pulsar. Fortunately, it hopped a lot quicker around the course than our car drove. Then there was the issue of the redbacks. Phil had sourced the mighty Nissan (corporate credo: “The power comes from inside”, which makes sense since not too many cars have their engines on the roof) from a paddock where it had lain peacefully for about 10 years. While he and Shane the sign man did a good job on the externals, the inside showed the after-effects of its stint in the field with lots of what I think was hay, dirt and small rocks. Phil did say the former owner had mentioned he had cleaned out a few redback spider nests from the car. Readers, you know that redbacks are one of Australia’s most deadliest things, next to finance brokers in car dealerships. A quick nip brings on nausea, vomiting and convulsions followed by death, which is never a good thing. And the redback spider bite is even worse.
This news prompted Tom Connolly to tell us all in graphic detail about the 21-year-old Sydney tradie, Jordan, who was bitten by a redback on the penis twice in five months. Look I know I am being sexist about this but the image of a young man with a spider attached to his genitalia did prey on the minds of the rest of us while racing around corners, where the hay and rocks were leaping about in close proximity to the aforementioned private parts and probably accounts for our less than stellar result.
Don’t forget next week is the start of the auction and concours fun on the Monterey Peninsula. I’m looking at moving up from the Nissan Pulsar, BMW 3 series and the BA Ford ute to the 2015 Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse that Mecum will be putting on the blocks for a lazy $3.8 million. Good for 408km/h down the straight at Marulan, this satin black, orange-interiored (would be called a Jaffa in Australia) is powered by a 900kW, W-16 engine on the inside and an active rear wing on the outside.
This is a shortened version of the original article – read the rest at The Australian
