Features

What's in your garage?
My daily driver is a Land Rover Defender Td5 Extreme. I've had it for seven years and I love the thing. It's like owning an old cattle-dog. Sure, it might have cataracts and its few teeth might be a bit yellow but honestly, the fleas don't really bother me.

I just can't part with it. The Defender just is what it is.

At the moment my garage contains the running chassis of a 1933 Dennis fire engine, which will ultimately match the other fire engine, a fully restored 1928 Dennis.

The rest of my collection of odd bits and pieces has been farmed out to various mates who have space. Of course, this costs me a six-monthly case of beer per vehicle which is a win-win for me, because I generally get to share in the down-payment anyway.

I have a '42 Willys Jeep in British SAS configuration - jerry cans, machine gun mountings, sun compass - and I have a 1943 White Scout Car, the four-wheel-drive forerunner to the American half-track. It's what every road-rager needs - quarter-inch armour plate, a 360-degree machine-gun rail - and thanks to its five-litre Hercules JXD motor, it can really get up and go. I think of it as a five ton sports car.

And the other car is a British, blood-red 1925 Bean torpedo-bodied roadster. Australian adventurer Frank Birtles drove an identical '25 Bean from England to Australia in 1927-28 becoming the first motorist to do so. And next year, I'm going to retrace his tyre-tracks in my Bean.

What's the fastest you've ever driven?
Years ago, a mate of mine owned a wheezing, geriatric 1973 XA Ford Falcon two-door, hand-painted the customary Mad Max matte black. Inside, the roof-lining fell around your ears giving the feel of sitting in the Sultan's tent, which also added an alarming element when the car was driven at high speed.

Just exactly what high speed was hard to tell, as the speedometer needle would bounce back and forth like a metronome from 0 to 280km, requiring some mathematical skill and guesswork to ascertain just how fast you were travelling. My optimistic mate always claimed we were travelling at 280, but then again it could have been 0.

Who or what caused your worst car crash?
Travelling at about 120kmh on an expressway in a Peugeot 504ti, I did the unforgivable and took my eyes off the road.

Only for a split-second, your Worship, while I ferreted around looking for a cassette tape.

Nevertheless, when I looked up I had rapidly closed in on a Cretaceous period Holden Torana puttering along the motorway at 70kmh.

The driver's silhouette was unforgettable - an old bloke with big ears and a skinny neck wearing a broad-brimmed hat, no doubt maintaining the wheel as though he was skippering the African Queen.

I swung the 504 across - just missing the Torana's boot, the Pug's front wheels losing control on the dirt shoulder, the car hitting a rock and rolling over and over.

I remember gripping the steering wheel thinking 'If I die now, I'm going to be really pissed off...'

The horizon spun as all my art gear tore loose, paintbrushes, bottles of ink, pens and pencils flew around the car before it finally came to land, right-way-up. All the wheels had broken off and I had to climb out through where the windscreen once was.

The bloke in the Torana just sailed off into the distance, no doubt singing along to Frank Ifield's I Remember You on the wireless, oblivious to the catastrophe that unfolded behind him.