Learning to drive with my father beside me was never going to be easy. He had zero patience and was a truly terrible teacher. I wasn’t expected to be just a regular driver. This I realised when driving his little Austin Special sports car around a field one day.…
The allure of Formula 1 is irresistible for me. I’ve followed it most of my life and I supposed I’ve loved and loathed it almost equally forever. I forever ask myself why I still find myself following every titbit of news, every practice run and every race, when so many of the sport’s orchestrators are seemingly trying to deter me at every turn ( no pun intended).…
Car nuts like me aren’t able to just watch and enjoy films and TV series like most normal folk. No, while others follow the plot, we can’t help scanning the background for any sign of an interesting car. What’s more, I usually have to point out what they are in great detail to my long-suffering wife.…
As I write this, a voice in my head is saying, “boring old git”. This may, or may not be true. Even so, I do find myself yawning when I read about the fastest car around the Nurburgring since last Tuesday. Even less interesting are the breathless announcements of new, ever faster supercars and hypercars, claiming ever more ballistic performance.…
I love a good argument, even with myself. After declaring the so-called new supercars/hypercars a waste of time and money in an earlier post (Supercars. So fast, so amazing. So what?) I have just read an article about the Adrian Newey – designed Aston Martin Valkyrie that has caused me to re-assess the whole genre.…
I love driving, especially outside Australia which must boast some of the world’s most moronic drivers. Any opportunity to get behind the wheel beyond our shores reminds me what a miserable country this is for a petrolhead like me. (Hmmm, quick aside – will we have ‘voltheads’ in the future?).…
A car shed! Yes, there have been some big changes to our household lately when we moved from the leafy, lower North Shore in Sydney to the even leafier and cooler climes of Wentworth Falls, in the Upper Blue Mountains. In January this year, my wife, Dexter the dog, the two cats, Brodie and Ashley, and I, all went on a voyage of discovery, leaving Sydney after 30 years – blimey, what have we done?…
Ah, car noises. When I was about three years old (so I have been told) I used to guess what car was going past our house by identifying its exhaust note, while hiding behind the curtains. And, (apparently), I would be successful most of the time. Even now, I can ‘hear’ those distinctive noises in my head, the ‘farty’ exhaust note of a Morris Minor, curiously completely different to an Austin with the same BMC A-series motor.…
Growing up in suburban South London in the late fifties and sixties, foreign cars were still a very rare sight on the roads. I knew they existed because my father took my brother and me to the Motor Show in Earls Court every year. There, we saw them in the metal.…