Was it Covid that made us all so selfish? All the focus and love for the past 18 months has gone to humans and animals (often the same thing). Who has thought about inanimate objects, well like Armco, the corrugated steel barriers invented in 1933 by Sheffield Steel Corp of Kansas that saves millions of lives every year by stopping people driving over cliffs or into each other?
Your WART team has. Why just last weekend during the Shannons Adelaide Rally your correspondent, egged on by co-driver Sultan Michael McMichael, massaged some metal coming out of a tight corner thus helping its feeling of loneliness and abandonment but radically altering the shape of the driver's side front panel.
As you would expect, we didn't let driving on three wheels slow us down. After a three-hour drive from the scene of the rally to the Sultan's Stepney St atelier (with a short stop to pick a corflute election sign from an inanimate light post) we replaced the metal panel with the plastic sign, with the assistance of all the world's supply of blue go-fast tape, replaced the front right Yokohama tyre with a not so good Dunlop (the Yokis in our size were out of stock), did some minor surgery on the suspension and my ego and we were back on the course.
A note here on the budget restraints your team works under. Most teams in the Modern Competition section have service crews to check tyres, fuel and engine after each stage. We weren't allowed any assistance, which really didn't matter since Mick had forgotten the tyre pressures and neither of us knew how to open the bonnet.
Anyway, as the old bloke says, "to finish first, first you have to finish". Despite missing three stages we ended up 17th thanks to extraordinary driving, navigating and 11 cars breaking down, rolling over and withdrawing.
There's always important life lessons to take away from motorsport. For instance, never leave your phone on the roof of the car while you put your helmet on. Five of us did, including the Sultan and I. Four of us got them back thanks to Apple's Find My Phone.
In Covid times never stay at a multistorey hotel. Or if you do, ask for a room on the first floor. My room was on level 10, where the average wait due to the four in lift rule was 20 minutes.
After four days, Tasmania's Eddie Maguire (no relation) and his appropriately named co-driver Zac Brakey in a super looking Dodge Viper took all the prizes, with Jeff Morton and Daymon Nicoli's Porker GT2RS just half a second behind. In the Classic section, dirt rally star Jack Monkhouse and Chloe Bojko creamed it in a 1973 Datsun 180B SSS.
After years of campaigning in this column and with the action of the ACCC's Rocket Rod Sims, the Federal Court this week found that Mazda Australia engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations to nine consumers about their consumer guarantee rights.