Given the importance of this day to the future of Australia we are rising to the occasion and only focusing on matters of such global significance that they transcend the sausage sizzle, the fact that after a Shorten Labor victory tonight we will all have to become members of the CMFEU, be assigned our own personal communist to lie under our bed who will report any subversive activities (such as driving non-electric cars) directly to Xi Jinping and the general collapse of Australian society.
The 1939 Porsche Type 64, yours for $30 million.
Friends, I don’t want to alarm you but very soon Xi Jinping and his cronies will own the global car industry. Yes, they have bought all our farms in Australia, all our iron ore, all our apartments and before you can say “two number 35s, three Chiko rolls and a fried rice”, we will all be driving Geelys.
Of course, they will be cleverly disguised as Volvos (already 100 per cent-owned), MGs (100 per cent-owned), Lotuses (51 per cent), Mercedes-Benzes (10 per cent), Aston Martins (Merc owns 5 per cent of Aston), Smarts (soon to be 50 per cent) and Holdens and Fords. With Aston Martin shares hitting a new low following this week’s trading update it can’t be too long until the Banbury Road, Gaydon plant moves to Hengshan Road, Ningbo.
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GLYNIS TRAILL-NASH
This can only lead to the most important question of the day. Will Mr Xi try to take the oldest Porker in the world back to Peking for his own collection? As you know Mr Xi is a serious petrol head and gatherer of fine automobilia. He and the Trumpster often talk over the merits of, say, the 1988 Cadillac Eldorado Seville (only 855 built and currently trading at $100k) vs a 1959 Messerschmitt KR 200 microcar with steering bar, three wheels, four-speed forward and reverse (RM Sotheby’s sold one last month for a record $110k). Anyway, RM are auctioning off what they say is “the most significant surviving piece of Porsche engineering and design history” ever sold. It’s the Type 64. And it’s up in August at the Pebble Beach Concours and auction extravaganza.
As you know the leader of Germany at the time, Adolph Hitler, got Ferdinand Porker to design a cheap car for the masses to enjoy the new highway system.
Ferdy and the team came up with KdF-Wagen (Kraft durch Freude: German for “Strength through Joy”). The original KdF, or what we know today as the beetle, had an 18kW donk and was good for 100km/h on any autobahn. In other words, it would have trouble pulling the skin off a vanilla custard. To promote the new car, Ferdy decided to enter in a 1939, 1500km race between Berlin and Rome. Like any metal head, Ferdy decided to hot it up with streamlined aluminium body panels and much bigger 22kW flat four. Now I wasn’t around at the time but the Sultan of Stepney (Herr Michel McMichel) was.
“Ferdy was pumped for the race. But then the blokes at the top went and invaded Poland and that was the end of it. The Ferdster was livid,” Michel told this column. The first 64 was grabbed by the German government. But the Ferdster didn’t give up that easily. He built two more and kept them but only No 3 survived the war. Ferdy had it restored by Pinin Farina and three owners later here it is. Yours for $30 million.
Talking of Porkers, our own Barton Mawer will be looking for his second win in a row in the World Time Attack Challenge at Eastern Creek in October in the PR Technology Porker 968. Time attack racing is like nothing you’ve seen before (unless you’ve been to the last nine). Owners spend small fortunes on making ordinary cars super powerful and super aero to do just only one fast lap. Barton won last year with a lap time of 1.19.8. Just so you get an idea of what that means, the fastest lap ever recorded at Eastern Creek was Nico Hulkenberg in an A1 Grand Prix race car. His time was 1.19.1. It’s a huge day that’s more like the Burning Man festival at Black Rock City without the nudity than a car event.
Talking of elections, once Michael drove the car back from Tassie, we have been working furiously in the back of The Stepney Street Global BMW Technical Research Centre (ie: his workshop) brewing a huge vat of Coopers Defibrillator for our election party. Combined with the few dozen McRae Wood Shiraz’s we bought from Jim Barry, the four of us should have a top few hours. Remember if you are brewing your own then Coopers has a contest for Australia’s greatest DIY brewer. On second thought I wouldn’t bother entering, our Defibrillator will take the money.
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