Morley's misbehaving Charger meant a trip to the scorcher shop was a no brainer
It was when the old Hemi six in the Spaghetti Jet began spluttering, fouling plugs and refusing to play ball (even after a careful tune and a ride on the gas analyser) that I knew the money I’d already spent on it was going to be wasted if I didn’t get a proper ignition system into it quick smart. When it was running, it was fair dinkum galloping; tons of torque and a real desire to rev out (not to mention a stupidly lopey idle to keep a dimwit like me entertained at every set of lights).
Experience has taught me that you don’t mess about with cheap and nasty imports with this stuff, and racing HQ Holdens years ago led me to the offices of Performance Ignition Services, an Aussie-owned business that has been setting compressed air and petrol on fire for decades. In fact, my old HQ racer was a right pig of a thing when we first shook it down, and my crew-chief brother made it very clear to me what the problem was and what I should do about it. So off to Performance Ignition I trudged to swap money for a device that will be utterly familiar to anybody who knows a carby from a barbie; a Scorcher distributor. The blokes at Performance Ignition have been hand-making these lovely, lovely dizzies for decades and anybody who has ever fitted one will only have good stories to tell.
So this time, a trip to the Scorcher shop was a no-brainer. Now, I haven’t fitted the new dizzy, coil and leads yet, so I’ll keep that for a future issue and I’ll let you know what sort of improvement it makes to what is a pretty wild 265. But since I was able to supply the compression ratio, rough cam specs and valve size when I placed my order, the lads have been able to graph the dizzy’s advance curve to suit the engine’s projected characteristics. Tailor-made for my car. Try that on Amazon.
New leads for newfound performance
Meantime, as with any workshop visit, it was equally inevitable that the fellas at Scorcher and myself indulged in a bit of bench racing (as yer do). The subject this time round was the ability of modern fuel to destroy spark plugs. Okay, I’ve covered this before, but Andrew at Scorcher had a little gizmo for testing suspect plugs. You plonk the plug butt-first into the machine and press a button, which fires several bazillion volts through the hapless NGK, allowing you to check the spark colour and strength. A brand new plug will fire off lovely fat jolts of blue spark. But a plug that has been fouled by modern ULP, even after the plug has subsequently been meticulously cleaned, sand-blasted, you name it, will only fizzle and fart a pitiful little yellow spark.
The advice, then, is to chuck any pre-fouled spark plugs straight into the nearest skip. Don’t even keep them as spares, because they’ll just not be up to it. Oh, and the accompanying advice was to not use Iridium or any fancy-schmancy plug in a carburetted engine. Even a resistor spark plug is no good with modern fuel on a carbed mill. Trust me, you don’t get insights like these, based on years of experiencing, buying crap online.
Simply the best and Aussie made
Andrew’s other piece of advice was to never change a condenser unless you absolutely have to. Even then, if you can find an old one rattling around your bits and pieces bucket, try that one first. Why? Because apparently, the new ones coming out of – you guessed it – China are just rubbish and don’t work at all half the time. And even if they do work initially, they’re odds on to suffer an early death. You have been warned.
Vale Ken Block
I never knew the bloke, but the news that Ken Block passed away just after Christmas following a snowmobile accident has left a lot of us speechless. It kind of reminded me of how confused I felt when Peter Brock was killed back in 2006. I mean, intellectually, we all know the reality of being human, and what that ultimately means. But equally, most of us were certain PB’s end would never come in the race car. Any other way, but never in a race car. How wrong we were. Yet that’s the same feeling I get when I think about Ken Block and anything with a motor and the potential to be hooned. Even if it was a snowmobile.
Block’s Hoonigan empire spawned many imitators, but nobody did such a fine job of elevating the idea of fun in a car to such levels as Ken did. His big-budget online videos were must-watches the moment a new one dropped and the lateral-thinking approach to a lot of it was great viewing, too. I mean, who would have thought to make a drift car out of a 1977 F150?
So, yeah, it was terrible news. But you know what was almost as bad? The fact that when I first saw the online announcement, I immediately questioned whether it was a fact or just another piece of internerd fake news. And I don’t think I was the only bloke thinking the same thing.
Ken Block took fun in a car to new levels and his creations were mind-blowing, like his F150 drift car
Eventually, I started to see posts from reputable online news sources, but those first few breathless announcements that barged their way into my news feed via some algorithm dreamed up by a bloke with a man-bun, really had me wondering.
This is a terrible state of play. It’s definitely a good thing that we don’t trust everything we read (actually, it’s a survival technique these days) but it scares me to think that there are people out there who imagine that posting something like a fake story about somebody’s tragedy is a good laugh. Not that this was the situation in this case, but the very fact that we now question this stuff as a matter of course proves that it happens often enough for us to be pretty cagey.
And then it got worse. Suddenly, all sorts of online platforms were publishing truly defamatory stuff about Ken Block. They not only questioned his (documented) achievements but cast doubts over his talent and the sort of bloke he was. And it was vile stuff, too. Pictures of wrecked snowmobiles with horrendous captions, appalling ongoing discussions over how good he never was, and every other kind of slur that could only be written by somebody with zero empathy for their fellow human being. Forget that a father and husband had died. Forget that his family was having the worst time of their lives, if there was a cheap shot or a frail joke to be made, the keyboard warriors really rose to the challenge. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Actually, they ought to be hunted down and horse-whipped.
So why’s this happening? An empathy void of that magnitude is something that a lot of behavioural scientists insist is part and parcel of living your life online rather than in the real world. They argue that because there is no face-to-face contact, nor any real ramifications of spouting the opinions of a demented jackass, we’ve developed a generation of online trolls who display all the emotional traits of somebody with major intellectual challenges. Things like being unable to read facial expressions, and no grasp whatsoever on how somebody might be feeling. Which to me, suggests that we’ve arrived at the point in human history where Acquired Autism Syndrome is finally a thing. (And, yes, I made that name up, but it fits pretty well.)
So here’s my solution for all the Windows 10 warriors out there. Switch the computer off, go out into the world and do something dangerous. Anything will do; mowing the lawn in bare feet, starting a barbecue with petrol, climbing on the roof… it’s up to you. Then, when it goes wrong, post a photo of your missing toes, third-degree burns, or fractured skull on your favourite online platform and wait three seconds for the smartarse, cruel comments to begin flowing. Then you might understand.
While I’m at it…
Man, I just can not believe how wrong some road safety campaigns get it. Consistently, too.
A few years back we had the TV advert that showed a car coming to a T-intersection – at which it was required to give way – driving through the intersection and cleaning up some poor bastard on a motorbike. So how did the voice-over message begin? ‘Give way at intersections’? Nope. ‘Never assume the road is clear’? Nope again. How about ‘You’ve done everything right…’ What?!?
You’ve done everything right? Hang on, you’ve just mowed down a motorcycle and you’re clearly, legally in the wrong. How the hell can that suggest you’ve done everything right?
Fundamentally, the campaign was putting the blame back on the biker because a motorcycle is harder to see than a neon-lit garbage truck. And that was the message: Bikes are hard to spot. But starting out by telling the car driver they’ve somehow done everything right clearly throws the blame onto someone else. In this case, a biker who is now in traction and enjoying his chicken parmy through a straw.
This was bad enough and I had a bit to say about it at the time. But recently, I’ve spotted another road safety advert on the crystal bucket that has sent me off the lounge and into orbit. This one is designed to convince you that five kays over the limit is a surefire recipe for death and mayhem.
It shows a family in a Falcon bumbling along to Grandma’s house (or some such nonsense) with Dad constantly creeping up to 85 in an 80 zone while the hapless coppers along the way are either thwarted by a semi between their radar and the Falcon or are distracted booking some other five-kay-over threat to western democracy.
Meantime, you just know what’s gonna happen: Dad’s going to let the needle creep up to 85 again and the world’s gonna end for this happy little family. Which of course it does, but not before Dad’s leaned over to Mum’s side to read something on her mobile phone, becomes distracted and speared off the tarmac into a ditch with the Falc just starting to barrel-roll before the vision cuts.
And that’s the point: The ad clearly shows the crash happening because Dad wasn’t watching the road. Not because he was doing 85 in an 80 zone. It wouldn’t matter if he’d been doing 70 or even 60 (or 160) he wasn’t watching the road and he subsequently drove off it.
Fade to black and then hit the sub-titles: The Lucky Ones Get Caught (for speeding, of course, thanks to the ad’s constant references to radar cops and the speedo needle’s position of walking speed over the posted limit. Oh, and thanks also to the fact that policing speed is a lot easier than policing distracted driving).
But what probably irks me most is that it’s my tax money that’s paying for these ridiculous, illogical, poorly planned, badly executed, snivelling, counter-intuitive, nanny-state, just-plain-wrong adverts that continue to be the only thing between me and the footy score. And, in a mahogany boardroom somewhere on the 56th floor, a group of advertising agency goons are laughing till they piss their pants, to the soundtrack of the till ringing with another big government road safety spend. Meanwhile, out in the real world, people are still getting hurt in big shunts because the TV has told them that if they don’t do 85 in an 80 zone, they won’t be in a car crash.
I swear, there’s gonna be some changes around here when I take over.
Road safety ads have a history of raising more questions than they answer
Morley’s tips for community harmony
For reasons known only to civil engineers, this country has a lot of intersections with three lanes going straight ahead that funnel down to two lanes just a couple of hundred metres through the junction. Most snoozers in their Camrys will avoid the left-most lane as changing lanes to the right and finding a gap between the other dawdlers in the middle lane is just too much to deal with. What with all those coloured lights to worry about…
Which means that temporary inside lane is often open to those of us who know where the noise pedal lives and aren’t afraid to tread upon it. But here’s my rule: If you intend to use that inside lane, you have a moral obligation to get on it when the light goes green. That way you, and the one or two cars who have joined you in that lane, will be off to the races and into clear air, ahead of the zombies in the other lanes and free to merge across to what was the centre lane. Winning.
And yet, how often do you pull up behind a car in that left lane, only to have them bumble away on the green, apparently having a slow race with the Camrys beside them and nobody prepared to back off to make a bit of merging space as the left lane peters out? Yep, all the time. Fundamentally, if you’re not gonna use it properly, leave the left lane to the experts.
From Unique Cars #475, February 2023