The gentle art of driving

Shona has a theory that all boys are born with wheels strapped to their bums. When you ask her what she means by this, you get the translation that once a boy is exposed to things on wheels, he immediately sets about finding out what it's limitations are. Put a skateboard under him and a boy will soon want to see how fast he can go on it and stay in control. He'll possibly also get into the trick category and also want to find out what he can jump with it. If it's a bike, he's again seeing how fast he can go and what he can duck and weave around on the road or what mounds of dirt he can jump.

The fact that a boy spends his whole life exploring what you can do on a set of wheels, according to Shona's theory, means most guys will drive within the limits of their car.

I missed out on getting acquainted with the various sorts of wheels when I was growing up, so virtually all my learning was done out in the traffic and not with a cheap skateboard or pushbike.

The information on this page is about my automotive learnings, as well as the progression of vehicles in my driveway.

The makings of a good driver?

The neighbours gave my mother some free tickets to Luna Park when I was quite young. Way back before go karts were popular, they had a very small oval track here with about ten karts on it. (I had to sit at the front of the seat to reach the pedals).

There was an island in the middle, a clump of about 5 unused karts at one end, and about four other people out on the track with me. One of the other guys was trying to drive his kart like it was a dodgem (or bump) car and he was having a hoot crashing into everyone and everything. The other carts were getting involved in his crashes, and I was tootling around like a Sunday driver avoiding everything and driving very cautiously. Even though it was meant t o be a one way track, the guy who was crashing into everything was driving any direction he pleased. Any time he headed toward me, I turned around and went the other way too!

My mother told me she thought I drove very well and she believed I'd do very well on the road. She also told everyone else for months later how good a driver I was going to be. Every time I heard her telling the story of how well I drove that kart I used to glow. Who knows if it's had any hand in me growing to have a love of driving (and riding)?

Two wheels or four?

Back when I was a lad, you could get out on the road on a motorbike at least 3 months before you could get out and about independently in a car. Three months is forever when you are young, so it was always going to be a motorbike first!

Getting the wind taken out of you

I wasn't allowed to have a pushbike as it was too dangerous to ride one of these things on the road my parents had decided.

When my grandfather helped me to build a billy cart when I was somewhere around 10, I was ecstatic! I soon found that unless you have someone to push you around (or a hill), billy carts can be pretty boring!

It didn't take me long before I was investigating the idea of putting a sail on it. I got myself a big sheet of clear plastic and cut it into a triangle, borrowed some broom handles out of the garage for the mast and boom, sewed the broom handles into the plastic and then tied the whole thing onto my precious billy cart.

With my heart pumping solidly in my mouth, I ducked out one windy day and pulled my home-grown land yacht up to the end of the street. The wind was blowing quite hard and it wasn't long before I was travelling along the gravel road at quite a speed weaving left and right to avoid the potholes. I flashed over about six unprotected crossroads (looking left and right to see if I was going to get hit by anything!) and was quickly approaching an intersection where there definitely would be traffic. I grabbed the brake (A stick that pivoted on a nail. When you pulled up on one end the other end dragged along the ground and stopped you!) I was pulling that hard that I lifted the back wheels off the ground before the nail gave way and I was just holding a stick with a nail in it in my hand as I sailed on toward the dangerous intersection.

I could see quite a number of cars going every which way at the six way intersection in front of me and didn't like my chances of avoiding them all at the speed I was going. The wheels on the billy cart were off an old pram, so they had spokes. I tried jamming the stick I had in my hand still in between the spokes. Only the end went in a little and my hand got pulled down onto the gravel road. I let go of the stick and took my last option - abandon ship!

I clambered out from under the racing hood of my billy cart and tried to jump off the back of it whilst hanging onto the steering rope.

I wasn't big enough or talented enough to jump, land on my feet and also stop the billy cart, so instead I jumped and got dragged for a short distance as I was hanging onto the steering rope. Thankfully with me pulling on the steering rope, the billy cart turned side on to the wind and blew over onto it's side breaking the mast in two.

With quite a few bits of gravel rash, I picked myself up, righted the billy cart  and set about pulling it home. I had to sort out the mast which was now dragging on the ground, the "brake" stick which was laying on the road some distance back, and the back wheel which was buckled and wouldn't turn any more.

The billy cart was abandoned in the backyard after that, and I told my mother I got the gravel rash from falling over when she asked!

An XL250 Honda

The XL250 Honda had a hard life with me. It taught me all about the joys of an internal combustion engine. Such things as four strokes requiring oil in the sump! You learn these lessons at night, on a freeway, when you are laying on the tank doing 115 kph (as fast as the bike went), and the back wheel stops turning! Interestingly, the lights also went out (no battery on that bike), and I was skidding about in the dark! Thankfully I found the clutch and rolled to the side of the road. After it cooled down, it actually started again, and I drove the rest of the way home very slowly. (With chunks of piston rings rattling around in the gearbox!)

A 6 speed CD400/4

As the 250 struggled to propel me at any speed particularly into a headwind, it had to be replaced by a bigger bike, didn't it? Next was a 400/4 Honda. Time to go for a road bike and get 6 gears too! To make sure it went fast, I got the red one! It was quite good for it's day with a standard 4 into 1 pipe that had quite a good note. The 6 gears were a pain though if you had to stop in a hurry without going down through the gears, as it took forever to find neutral or first again.

Alfa Romeo Guilia

Had a couple of close calls with people doing things like u-turns in front of me when I had the bike, so finally thought it was time to come in from the weather! Traded the bike in on a 1965 Alfa Romeo Guilia. The day I went to pick this up with a friend, the wiring loom under the dashboard decided to catch fire and fill the car with noxious fumes. We were still sitting outside the car dealership (with the salesman sitting in the car with us) when this happened, so there was no disputes about warranty. They would not let me take the bike back until the Alfa Romeo was fixed, but gave me a clunky and unroadworthy Datsun to drive for the fortnight.

I thought I was doing reasonably well looking after the Alfa Romeo, but I still managed to cease the engine (so one of my mate's fathers told me). This car took me, and quite a few others, on trips all over Victoria and I kept it on the road with parts from the wreckers and retread tyres.

It was a good, reliable car and I was surprised that when I traded it in I got a number of abandoned car phone calls about it from a council. If I'd thought about it, I could have gone and picked it up for free before it got impounded and auctioned.

Laverda 1000

I think that when motor bikes get "in your blood" they are there forever.

Circumstances changed in my life and I investigated trading the Alfa Romeo on a Laverda 1000 motorbike.

It is extremely interesting how much attention a motorbike can get. I was pulled over a number of times so the police could just check out what sort of bike I was riding! Perhaps it was the note that the 3 into 1 exhaust pipe had that drew attention to the bike as it was quite loud.

Although the tank was quite large for a motorbike, the engine had been worked and the carburetors had been rejetted so they drank heavily. To travel comfortably at 60kph meant using 2nd or 3rd gear at most. When I went for rides with my mate who had a BMW RS1000, he'd go the whole ride on one tank and I'd have to stop and fill up.

I noticed one day that there were some cracks in the frame near the bottom engine brackets, so I stripped the frame and had it re-welded.

Opposite to how I treated the Alfa Romeo, I spent everything I had on the Laverda. I loved that bike! 

'Til death do us part

Sadly, the Laverda and I made a mess of each other when a kid failed to stop at a stop sign one morning.

The bike became scrap metal, and after a short stint of playing superman, I splattered into the road.

The other side of the bike is the one that collided with the car. My right foot was between the bike and the car at that time.

Possibly due to the trauma or the extensive number of broken bones causing fat embolism problems, I was in a coma for six days. I died and had to be revived on the first night, and over the following five year period I had twenty five operations which created even more scars all over my body. Sixteen years after the crash I finally had my "saved" foot amputated.

A really big truck?

Whilst I was laying back in hospital I had nothing much else to do for a very long period of time. I was transferred by ambulance to a different hospital twice during that time and was quite traumatised by the experience. It got me thinking that I'd probably do best to get myself something like a truck when I got out on the roads again.

I went without a vehicle for quite a long time as there was no way I could drive. Both of my legs were quite stuffed, so sitting and pushing pedals was really not an option.

When I did finally get mobile again, a mate sold me a 1963 Ford XL sedan with a two speed automatic transmission! I could drag anything off from a set of lights until it changed gears at 15 mph, then everything overtook me again!

It was a good car for what it was, but I found I was going through an incredible amount of fuel even on country trips. (Maybe it was the way I drove it? Or perhaps the two speed automatic gearbox was not really designed for highway use?)

Chrysler Galant

I started doing a large number of kilometres with a job that I was trying on the other side of town so getting a lot better fuel economy suddenly had some importance. The idea was to trade in the Ford on an economical and probably manual small car. The colour of the lemon Galant should have been a warning! There were a few problems with that little beasty! Our time together was made even worse toward the end by the totally crumpled boot it got when a HG Holden crashed into the rear of it. The HG Holden didn't even get a scratch on it's own paintwork!

It's a new car!

During one of the many trips to the mechanics with the Galant, I was foolish enough to wander onto the new car lot. I was even more foolish to start chatting with the salesman that approached me. I told him I was dreaming as we could never afford a new car. He told me to, "Come inside. Let's do the sums!" Car salesmen must have different calculators to the rest of us! I remember at school there were lots of occasions I couldn't get my sums to work, but every time I ever speak with a car salesman - their sums always work out!

Before we knew it there was a five speed Mitsubishi GH Sigma station wagon sitting in our driveway. The station wagon was partly motivated by the St. Bernard that we now had. It was the early days of metallic paint jobs, and the coppery/brown looked quite good when it was clean and new. (That's it behind the white Pajero below).

NA Mitsubishi Pajero SWB

I received some pain and suffering money after the crash I'd had on my Laverda motorbike and went straight out and bought a new five speed petrol Pajero that had just been released in Australia. Apart from the uneconomical 2.6 litre Sigma engine, everything else was a joy for it's day. I towed two ton tractors from one side of Melbourne to the other (Macedon to Mornington) and all sorts of things with it. It was quite easy to see how these cars won the Paris-Dakar rallies for so many years.

GJ Sigma GSR

The GH Sigma wagon was still going fine but it wasn't air conditioned. We had some installed. The tyres were a bit "iffy" in the rain. We had some new ones put on it. Now the steering was way too heavy (because the new tyres gripped so well!) Rather than coming straight out and saying she ALSO wanted a new car, my wife at the time sent us on an expensive path adding bits to what she already had first.

She still wanted a Sigma as she liked them. She just wanted it to be a new one! She took a liking to the new blue GSR that was in the showroom. So the GH wagon got traded in. (We still had a St Bernard - it now had to travel on the velour backseat!)

Down trade time

Perhaps you've already guessed that the money I got from my motorbike crash didn't last long? As I had no job it was time to trade our cars in for cheaper ones. The Pajero got traded in on an old GE Sigma station wagon. We'd been told that the early models of Sigmas were super reliable. The sad and tired green one that we bought was only ever sad and tired!

Colt 45

We also traded the GJ Sigma in for a new bottom end of the range Mitsubishi Colt 45. This was always a zippy little car and I could not fault it for the whole time we had it. My wife at the time claimed it for her own use, so I mainly got to drive the GE Sigma wagon except when I needed to get to some destination reliably.

XD Falcon station wagon

I took a loan out against the house to buy into a company (to ensure I had secure employment I thought) and I needed a bigger car for the courier work that was involved, so I traded the GE Sigma in on an XD Falcon Wagon. Again lemon in colour and experience! It gave me problem after problem and ultimately put me off Fords for life! (Although I do look at the F250 7.4 litre diesels and imagine I could tolerate that! Mightn't be able to find anywhere to park it, but I certainly would enjoy driving it!!!)

 Alfa Romeo Guilietta

I remembered how reliable the first Alfa Romeo was and thought it might be time to change again. The XD Falcon was quickly traded in for an Alfa Romeo Guilietta which was a zippy little sedan. It had most of the modern equipment as standard, but was disappointing in how much rust it gathered so quickly! I tried selling this car privately when our finances were not looking so good, and would have to say it is a hard task to move a specialty car in a hurry and still get the best price for it.

VH Commodore "Vacationer"

I tried to make do with the Colt for the work I was doing, but finally traded that in on VH Commodore sedan, and my first v8 and it was also automatic. Wow! I was hooked! It was the "small" 4.2 litre V8, and I reasoned that the engine would be worked that bit less than a 6 cylinder, so the reduced maintenance costs would more than offset the additional fuel bill.

It did a number of long trips around Victoria and a couple of almost non-stop trips between Brisbane and Melbourne. On three of those trips it was pulling a heavy trailer. Apart from running out of petrol and getting a cracked head (but continuing to run) I couldn't fault it for it's day.

This was by far the most luxurious car I'd had to date.

Public transport

The Alfa Romeo got written off by the boyfriend of my now ex-wife. The car was all in my name, and as it was with a friend to be sold, it was also uninsured! I told my sorry plight to the finance company and gave them the wreck. I continued to pay the payments on the car as before, but now there was no car, nothing to sell, and no fast way to clear up this debt!

The VH Commodore also went back to the finance company as I couldn't afford it any more. Keep in mind that if you ever hand back an item that is on Hire Purchase, the finance company does not care that you were trying to do the right thing - you still end up with a big black mark against your name. The finance company consider it a repossession, mark your account as "defaulting" and they auction off the car with no reserve price, and you still owe them the difference between what it sold for and what you still owed them. I made the right arrangements and paid them the rest of their money. I find it bizarre that they marked my records with the finance being a "write off".

HX Holden Premier

I started a new job and was carpooling to work with two other guys. One of the guys decided to help me get some finance as he needed me to have a car for the carpooling. I got an HX Premier sedan with a 4.2 litre V8 and automatic gearbox. It was a cheap car and you could do most of the work on it yourself with a shifting spanner and a screwdriver.

Corolla SE

The Premier was such a simple and easy car to look after. It needed something done to it almost every weekend, but otherwise it always ran. My partner at the time hated it though and she got me to trade it in on a new and reliable car. At the time, the cheapest new car was the base model Corolla hatch back. It came with a 1.4 litre engine, 5 speed manual gearbox, no radio and only with white paint job.

Beep, beep Barina

I split with my previous partner and she took the Corolla back off me as she didn't trust me to make the payments.

When I started dating again, my new girlfriend had the first model Barina and we both shared driving it around. It was actually quite a good little car. We took it for trips to Canberra and on country drives as well as scooting around town in it.

Pajero SWB

One day my girlfriend and I were having a chat about cars and we both realised that we liked the new Pajeros that were out. We went to the car yard to have a look at them more closely. My girlfriend ended up signing up for one that night! My finances were still stuffed at the time, so it all had to be in her name. It had a 3 litre V6 and 5 speed dual range box.

Corolla SE once more

Of all the cars I'd ever driven or travelled in, the Pajero was the best, but we came to the realisation that we were spending all our time just keeping it on the road and we were not actually getting to get away in it as we intended.

We decided to trade it down to a base model Corolla again so we could finally get out of the rent cycle and buy a house.

The house we ended up buying was way out of town in one of the "growth corridors" and it was not feasible to have just the Corolla as my partner and I didn't work the same hours.

(If you ever do the sums, you might wonder if it makes any sense to "own" in an outer suburb and travel long distances to work, or rent closer to work and spend very little on travelling. We found it wasn't any cheaper, but it was the only way we'd ever afford the house deposit.)

Mini Clubman

We went looking for a cheap 2nd car for me to run around in. We found this cute Mini Clubman at a price we could afford, then as it broke down so often we spent twice what we paid for it to do up the engine and have the brakes converted from drums to disks. Maybe getting the brakes done didn't matter too much in the wet as it used to take about 10 metres for the brakes to dry out before they'd work. So you'd go from no brakes to fully locked up and sliding! Wet days were always "heart stoppers" It had great acceleration and used to fly but was so small that I used to get cut off frequently. The heater stopped working within the first year, and it had no demister nor radio, but it WAS cheap to run!

Beep beep once more

It was somewhere around the time I became an amputee that we chose to convert from a manual car to an automatic. I asked the question about automatic gear boxes for minis, but it was not viable. We ended up at a Holden car yard and traded the mini in on a Blue Barina. Now I was warm, had a radio and could brake reliably in wet weather, but the car performed like a slug when compared to the mini.

VT Berlina station wagon

Along came a promotion at work and I was able to get a company car. We chose to sell the Corolla and get a 5 litre V8 and slightly up market Berlina. After driving the under powered front wheel drive Barina, the 170kW rear wheel drive Berlina was amazing. Now there were luxuries like air conditioning and a CD player.

When I got this car (and every car since), I had it converted to a left foot accelerator pedal by Frank's Engineering. This means you use your left foot on both the accelerator and brake pedals. It also means you need to do your license test again.

It's a little like learning to drive. You need to instinctively get the correct foot on the correct pedal (but the instinct takes a while to build)

Allowing someone else to drive your modified car?

It seems the pedal on the left can get mistaken for a clutch pedal by other drivers! That's regardless of there being no pedal on the right. I had my first modified car in getting it washed at a local hand car wash place and they'd dealt with the pedal being on the wrong side for over a year. One particular day, one of the younger assistants jumped in to move it forward. He checked everything out, started the engine, put it into "D", took the hand brake off, and floored it!!!!! All I could do was watch as he rocketed out the back of the wash bay and down an alleyway. I was holding my breath hoping there wouldn't be a crunching sound, but there was. The car came to rest with a shed on top of it and two other cars damaged.

Another car modified similarly with the "go" pedal swapped to the left was turned into a rocketship momentarily when the mechanic got it wrong. He was putting the car on the hoist, but floored it and had the car shoot across the hoist, hit the stoppers at the end and become airborne until it crashed into a wall. On the way to the wall, it destroyer a tyre changer and a battery charger.

Perhaps you might guess that I don't readily let anyone else drive my cars any more?

VT Berlina sedan

The Barina got sold and we got a second VT Commodore for my wife to use. This was only the 6 cylinder, but it was just as quick off the mark as the v8 wagon. It was quite frugal on fuel although the engine sounded very harsh by comparison to the V8.

VX Calais sedan

The VT wagon got to replacement age and I replaced it with a fully optioned VX Calias with the 5.7 litre V8. The engine had plenty of power, but it also had an excessive thirst for oil. The sunroof stole some of the roof space, so I had to sit a little slumped to avoid banging my head on the inside of the roof.

Vectra CD hatch

My wife and I split up and I was locked into a lease on the VT sedan so I let her continue to drive it around for another year. I then had an offer to sub-lease it so I wasn't totally out of pocket, so I took this option.

A short while later Shona and I got together and when she moved over to Melbourne she would drop me at work and use my car for the day, then come and pick me up.

She confessed after a while that as she wasn't from Melbourne, she spent more time being lost than making any use of having the car for the day. We arranged for another car that she could drive around the areas she was comfortable - a Vectra CD, and even though I told her black would be impossible to keep looking clean, it had to be a black one!

Toyota Echo 3 door

Within a couple of years we were doing  the sums (after I was released from the lease on the VT sedan), and we figured that we'd be better off financially to own a small car and pay the associated bills than to continue to lease on the Vectra. We found that we could buy the lease out and were able to sell the car for the same figure. Shona loved the Vectra and had a great trouble-free run with it, but she tells me she is happy that we decided to rationalise our finances.

We walked into the Toyota car yard and asked what was the cheapest car they had. After taking the 3 door Echo for a test drive  the conversation went back and forth about what extras could they sell us, and us saying we just wanted the base car.

BMW X5 3.0d

I'd been checking the BMW X5's out ever since they were introduced into Australia. After 2 years of checking them out they introduced the first diesel. I sat inside one and the salesman told me to fire it up. No glow plugs, no time lag, and when it's warmed up, it's hard to hear that it's a diesel! As it was not converted to left foot accelerator I could only sit in  the passenger seat when I was on the "test drive". I quizzed Shona relentlessly on what it was like to drive! We were sold! So we signed the million and one forms and BMW finance came back and said "Yes". (Must have been due to all that money we'd been able to save by having the Echo!)

Although we were locked into a lease on the Calais we got a buyout price and the trade in price we were offered matched. To get the best possible trade-in price for the Calais I took it to get new tyres put on it. That was April Fool's Day. Just after midday the mechanic rang me to say "Mike, I've got some bad news!" As it was a company car, I thought he was going to tell me that the tyres had been knocked back by the fleet people. Instead he told me that he'd just driven the car into the wall! I double checked what the time was as you aren't supposed to do April Fool's jokes after midday. It was 12:30. I asked where the car was "right now". He calmly said "In the wall"! So, there you have it - at some point in a car's life, if the "go" pedal is on the wrong side, someone will get caught out and try to use it like a clutch!

Meantime, the particular options we would like on an X5 happened to be on one that was loaded on a ship already. We paid a deposit, they allocated it to us, and we sat back and waited whilst the Calais got repaired and the ship with the X5 on it got closer to Australia. The ship finally docked. The Customs people finally released the X5. Holden finally found a spare part (in Cairns!) that was stopping the front bumper from being refitted to the Calais. The 2700kg Hayman Reece towbar got fitted to the X5. The Calais got traded in. (Due to the bad press the 5.7 litre engines had been getting, the value of the car shrank by 9% over the 5 weeks it took to repair!)

Then the big day came! Shona and I drove up to Doncaster BMW in the Echo to take delivery of the new X5. I signed another million bits of paper in triplicate (at least!) and got to sit in the car. After they finished telling us all about it, I got back into the Echo and Shona followed me in the X5 to Frank's Engineering to get a left foot accelerator pedal fitted. I couldn't drive it until it was converted. All the test drives I'd had were on the passenger seat! I was so hanging out to drive it!

Thankfully, the conversion was finished on the Saturday so we took it for a short drive to Grand Ridge Road! Seven hours later we pulled back into the driveway. Shona asked me, "Well?" I was Beemering from ear-to-ear!

The next Saturday we went for another short drive. This time to Lorne on the Great Ocean Road. We came back via the inland route and tried some of the "dry weather only" roads that lead off into the national park areas. I can report that an X5 diesel is a very capable all roads vehicle! I couldn't fault it with anything I tried. Again, seven hours later we pulled back into the driveway.

Although the car is actually manufactured in the USA, it is to the original German design and specification. The trailer electrical plug is therefore a 13 pin job! To get around this, BMW Australia have a 13 to 7 jumper cable. On investigating what the 13 pins are actually wired to do, I think I'd sooner have them perform those functions than to be blanked off like 6 of them have been.