Integrity warning (actually lack of integrity warning): Today’s column contains gratuitous mentions of sponsors and suppliers to TheWeekend Australian Racing Team (WART).
Resuming normal transmission: Don’t worry about the F1 in Austin, Texas, this weekend. Lewis Hamilton will win as he has four times before. Local note: Alan Jones won this race in 1980.
Forget the V8 Utes, the Porsche Carrera Cup and the V8 Supercars today at the home of bad taste, Surfers Paradise; Dave Seiders will take the Utes, Matt Campbell the Porkers and Jamie Whincup and Shane van Gisbergen will fight out the Supercars.
Now that you don’t have to watch any of that, you can focus on the motor racing event of the year, the 24 Hours of LeMons at Wakefield Park in Goulburn, NSW, on Friday and Saturday.
Yes, race fans, we’ve dragged the BMW Supercar out of the shed in the Adelaide Hills where it has been resting for a year in what, these days, you would call a barn-fine state. Also in the barn 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. Calming medicine was needed so we headed to the Cudlee Creek Restaurant for a few Coopers ales, which must good for you because the brewer is a doctor.
When we got back, there was no sign of Brownie. Either our approach worked or one of our drivers is up for a mighty surprise during the race. The next discovery was that if you leave a car in the same place for a year the tyres develop flat spots or, put another way, they become square. This made it hard to get out of the shed particularly since the mighty Beemer’s engine showed no sign of wanting to start. Anyway, since Dr Cooper’s medicine was working its magic through our veins and we had some residual fears about Brownie, we left the car where it was and went back to the Cudlee to think more about it.
Luckily, former hipster Matt McGill from our transport and race management supplier, Garth Walden Racing, turned up the next day and got the car into the transporter. You remember Garth was last year’s world time attack champion. This year he decided not to enter to give Holden V8 Supercar racer Tim Slade a chance to win and take two seconds off the lap record. Just to confuse things, Tim was driving a Nissan for Murray Coote’s MCA Suspension team while our own Brad Shiels put in a very consistent performance in the Insight Racing 350kw Holden Astra.
You’ll be pleased to know we have had an overwhelming response to our desperate call for pit crew. There will be photos next week. As you know, WART is committed to diversity and in our team of 20 there is one woman and an accountant. In the manner of Walden deciding to give someone else a chance, last year’s WART top driver and supplier of our car, Dean How from Peninsula BM, Australia’s biggest specialist BMW dismantler (wrecker), dropped out citing our race engineer Michael McMichael’s snoring (at night, not while at the wheel).
Michael owns South Australia’s top BMW service outfit. (I warned you about the gratuitous mentions.) We haven’t got the 3 series coupe started yet and it’s hard to make square tyres round again but there’s a week to go.
And last Thursday the world’s top boutique classic car dealer, Simon Kidston, led 23 Lamborghini Miuras to the car’s spiritual home, the Miura cattle ranch (Ganaderia Miura as we say up that way) in Andalucia, Spain, to celebrate the birth of the auto that changed supercars forever. This year is the V12 mid-engined, 280km/h piece of insanity’s 40th birthday. In June, Miuras from all over the known world drove around northern Italy, naturally stopping off at Lamborghini’s Sant’Agata factory. Just to show what’s important in the land that’s the silver medallist to us in number of prime ministers, four Eurofighter jets flew over the group while they were sipping their morning Rioja.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, who was a Taurus, made his company brand a bull after a visit to Don Eduardo’s Miura ranch. He then named the Miura after Spain’s biggest and most difficult fighting bull despite not asking the owner’s approval. Ferruccio was always naming his cars after fighting bulls. The weirdest was the Lamborghini Islero 2+2 Grand Tourer. Islero was the name of a bull that gored and killed Spain’s greatest bull fighter, Manuel Sanchez.
This is a shortened version of the original article. To read the rest go to: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/near-thing-with-brownie-requires-medicinal-treatment/news-story/c2df52043494c8bf1fd8827d3d328f14
