It was the kind of call that sends a rush of terror all the way from your quickly thinning hair to your badly pedicured toenails.
“They are breath testing every driver at the start. If you’re even a bit over you can’t race. It’s a long way to come just to look at some old cars. We need a plan.”
My co-driver in the Classic Adelaide Rally, Michael McMichael, was clearly worried.
With the help of our sponsor, a highly qualified medical practitioner, we worked out if we started dinner at 6pm, in the Star of Siam in Gouger Street, and finished on the dot of 8pm, and limited our intake of fellow rally entrant Andrew Hardy’s Petaluma sauvignon blanc (a snip at $23 a bottle) to the maximum amount you could drink in two hours, we would pass.
Gouger Street on Friday night, the eve of the world-class Adelaide Motorsport Festival, was bigger than the crowning of King Fatty on the eve of Carnival in Rio. (Of course, a few of the WART — Weekend Australian Racing Team — could pass for King Fatty, but let’s not go there.)
But while Rio has feathers and scantily dressed persons of all sexes, Gouger Street had Australia’s favourite party show band, Chunky Custard (who doesn’t love dancing in the streets of the city of churches to the Monkees’ I’m A Believer?), a huge range of incredible machinery including Ferrari F1 cars, a Brock Torana, Holden Supercars, our mighty early 90s BMW and all the excesses, celebrated as a profane event, which could be interpreted as an act of farewell to the pleasures of the flesh. Hold on, that last bit is Rio, not Adelaide.
Anyway, fast forward to Victoria Park on Saturday, where the display of men, women, machines and bratwurst put Goodwood and Pebble Beach to shame.
Best of all, the classic racing is non stop, you can just about stand next to the track and you can touch all the cars (not the ones going around the track). And Bodri’s bake their kurtosh kalach and langallo on site. Yes readers, there were 14 Ferrari road cars on the track, six F1s, three McLarens and more Porsches than Coopers in a Regency Park cafe.
Worst of all were officials in Hi-Vis vests with whistles. Look, we know what happens when you put anyone in a Hi-Vis vest and give them some power. Give them whistles and have them direct traffic, including departing rally cars and race cars leaving the track, and the words Chinese fire drill don’t do the scene justice.
The Classic Adelaide Rally runs through the hills, or as regular readers know them, brown snake park. Despite co-driver Michael being an Adelaide citizen and rally route veteran, he refused to give me any help or navigation guidance when I was steering. There was only one thing to do. I placed the GoPro on the dash in front of him and accelerated down a hill with the gradient of Niagara Falls. Once we were doing about 700km/h into a 180 degree hairpin. I braked only when he screamed, started talking to Bill and Bert on the big white telephone and began begging for his life. I did post this scene on Facebook but the authorities said the language and visuals were too strong for a family medium and took it down.
Strangely, this newspaper’s food writer, John Lethlean, wasn’t entered in any of the events. Whether this was to do with his reviews of any establishments in Motor City, or the fact that he hasn’t yet bought one of the classic Ferraris he has been looking at is a mystery we will solve later.
Also strangely, the star of the 1989 Adelaide GP, Pierluigi Martini, refused our offer of a seat in our 24 Hours of LeMons team. Maybe this was because he didn’t speak English or we said we couldn’t afford to pay him, but either way there won’t be much talent at Queensland Raceway next September.
This is a shortened version of the original article. To read the rest go to: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/classic-adelaide-rally-adelaide-rallies-to-the-cause/news-story/44e7b5becd0c0f4e7b84e6df20dc4e33
