Good news! There's now a path forward out of our suffering and misery. No, I'm not talking about Scotty's plan for Australia. Who cares about that? I'm talking about Motorsport Australia's strategy for the resumption of motorsport activity in a COVID-19 environment.
Always one with a great turn of phrase, new name and logo says: "It is critical to this industry and the community more broadly that we develop a strategy to manage the resumption of motorsport in the most expeditious, responsible and risk averse manner possible in the COVID-19 environment."
At least two of you will remember four years ago when we had to drag the Michael McMichael Motors Supercar out of the shed where it had been resting for a year in what, these days, you would call a barn-find state. Along with our Beemer we found a very large common brown snake. Since it's classed as the second most venomous land snake in the world, we decided to take heroic, manly action. What we did was yell at Brownie through the shed door, leave the door open, run away and hope he would leave.
You've probably had your fill of binge-watching old TV series, so this week what about reading a few books. A book is a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.
Can I suggest a few old on the road favourites?
Of course, there's Aspen's most famous resident, until the Australian CV-19 crew turned up, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which one critic fairly described as "a vicious, drug-fuelled screed about the meaning of the gambling mecca, and how the hippie ideal had become corrupted by the Nixon-era version of the American dream." From the petrolhead point of view the focus should be on the red 1971 Impala convertible (Red Shark) which he drove to sin city and the 1971 Cadillac Eldorado convertible he rented once he got there. Today you can pick up a good '71 for around $25k.
The 1957 On the Road is an early version of Hunter's tome. Jack Kerouac's notes on his travels across the United States is the defining book of the postwar beat and counter-culture generations. Anyway, Jack drove a 1949 Hudson ($40k today).
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days tells the story of Nellie Bly's 1889 real life race to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg's 80-day trip, using steamship, rickshaw, horse and donkey and train.
Like this column, John Steinbeck's Travel With Charley is fiction based loosely on fact. John and his large poodle Charley buy a new GMC pickup truck fitted with a Wolverine camper pack on the back, making him, at 60, the first grey nomad and inventor of the RV. He made the 16,000km trip across 33 states knowing that he was dying.