My Other Wife Is a Car: Confessions of a Car Tragic

268 Pages·2009·5.79 MB·English

by  John Wright

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My Other Wife is a Car
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My Other Wife is a Car
Confessions of a Car Tragic
John M. Wright
All attempts have been made to locate the owner of copyright material.
If you have any information in that regard please contact the publisher
at the address below.
First published in 2009
Copyright © John M. Wright 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution
(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au
978 1 74175 660 9
Set in 10.5/16 pt Else by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1
WRoXanne 1
2 Flash Harry: chasing Jaguar tales 13
3 Teenage crime 33
4 Gentlemen’s carriages 45
5 Stars in my eyes 63
6 In search of the best affordable BMW 77
7 Candy apple 89
8 Fiat fantasia 101
9 A personal Alfa-bet 109
10 Driving to Bathurst 119
11 The Shire of Monaro 137
12 On not owning Falcon GTs 145
13 Other favourites—not by marque 153
14 Luxury export to the US 167
15 Visions of Rianna 177
16 A Chiko Roll in the Kimberley 185
17 Seamless seems less 209
18 Confessions of a used car salesman 227
19 Dear Edith 241
Afterword: Insider trading 245
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1
WRoXanne
Resting in the garage now, my turbocharged all-wheel drive Subaru
WRX still crackles from a fast drive home but will be entirely silent
in minutes, how could anyone prove she isn’t animate?
2 My Other Wife is a Car
For car tragics, the word ‘driven’ holds a treasure chest
of meaning. The world is full of driven people but most
car tragics are happier behind the wheel than squirming
in the passenger seat. For many, indeed, their passion is
the art-cum-sport of driving. I have heard of one man who
raced at Le Mans in the 1970s and still goes to enormous
lengths to avoid being driven by anyone else, trusting only
himself, conscious no doubt of every apex, every swing of
the tachometer needle.
Others, however, are happier in overalls than oversteer,
dreaming Concours d’Elegance rather than Targa Tasmania.
They may sneak down to the shed after dinner to finish
polishing the underside of an early model Volkswagen Beetle.
They care more for ignition timing than lap times.
But while some car tragics prefer restoration to driving,
many others relate more closely to the racing driver standing
helmet in hand while someone else does the dirty work.
Think Steve McQueen in Le Mans and the unforgettable lines
‘Racing . . . it’s life. Anything that happens before or after,
it’s just waiting.’ Those few words conveyed the meaning of
the movie (and, I suspect, much of McQueen’s own life). I
was about 37 and had just begun circuit racing when I first
understood exactly how that idea worked. My little racer
was a thirteen-year-old Alfetta complete with rust and torn
upholstery but in a reasonable state of tune. The lap times
I had managed were quite good. I invited a fellow driver,
who had never been behind the wheel of an Alfa but was a
specialist in Mazda rotaries, to try my car. After just three
WRoXanne 3
laps he was within a tenth of a second of my time. Although
he never went quicker, he proved to me that it is about the
driving, and nothing to do with ‘knowing’ your own vehicle.
No matter how bonded I may have felt with the Alfetta, I
enjoyed no privilege of ownership. My embarrassment in
recounting this story now is that it had taken me so long to
learn that the art of driving exists independently of brands
and favourites. It also explains the adage of the famous
racing driver arriving at a circuit for the first time with
only two questions: what’s the lap record and which is the
direction of travel?
For many, the obsession attaches to a particular marque
of car or even one particular model—a Ford Falcon GTHO
Phase III perhaps, or an Armstrong Siddeley Star Sapphire.
As I write, I imagine a doctor of about my own age in
some leafy Melbourne suburb picking up a fountain pen to
begin a letter to the Jaguar club magazine. ‘I’m so sick of
all this tosh about BMWs,’ he writes. ‘Why can’t those ill-
informed motoring journalists understand that our cars are
the finest in the world?’ My dear doctor, I reply in my
imagination, if you owned a Rover or an Aston Martin or
even a Humber you would feel exactly the same way. (And
by the way, will you be free for lunch next Wednesday at the
Naval and Military Club?)
Despite belonging to too many car clubs and for all
different reasons, I have no patience with one-marque
fanaticism, which might explain why I generally own up to
ten cars at any one time and rarely double up on brands.