Ducking Poverty - Revcounter 385

By: Guy Allen

Date: 18.05.2016

Feel an urgent need to empty your wallet? Work with car nuts

From Unique Cars issue #385, February 2016

It’s taken a while, but I’m slowly coming to the awful realisation that I probably can’t afford to stay in this job. Surprisingly, I don’t pay them to work here – they pay me. So that isn’t the issue.

The problem is the lunatics I work with. I mean that in the nicest possible way…love you like brothers and sisters, but I need cheaper friends.

Let’s take the last couple of days as an example. Morley – our workshop bloke – has been hovering about, talking about buying a new race car. Now if you have known Morley as long as I, you’ll realise ‘new’ in his world is anything made after they stopped building the Kingswood. (Just as an aside, my Kingswood-owning spouse, Ms M Snr, reckons the country has never been the same since…)

So we’re not talking what the rest of us understand as ‘new’ and we’re not talking Porsche or Ferrari. We’re talking Commodore, and preferably chrome bumper era. Anyway, the theory is he can build himself a nice little hillclimb car for stuff-all money. Well, under 10k. He’s gone and bought the donor car (rather unkindly named Project Duckshit after the unfortunate brown paint), which you can read about next issue.

Meanwhile he’s got the rest of us thinking that’s not a bad idea. We could all go and buy a cheap donor car and go racing together. What could possibly go wrong? Glenn Torrens, our man in NSW, can tell you at length. He’s been doing questionable things to a Beetle for years now and I suspect he’d be living next to Bill Gates if he’d taken up something less wallet-draining.

Speaking of Torrens, he’s part of the problem. He spends a fair bit of time in the office helping out each issue and has become part of the loop of car spotters. That includes Dep Ed Enright and Angelo the Artist. Just the other day, there was serious discussion over who should buy the very tidy VL turbo wagon, or the Bertone-designed Volvo 262C. And that was before lunch. The ideas tend to get wackier as the blood sugar levels drop during the long afternoons.

Of course Uncle Phil is no bloody help. Last time I made the mistake of spending a morning in the car with him it cost me 17 grand. As for Mary, our web mistress, she has a flock of Alfas and keeps sending us tempting little ads out of Tradeuniquecars.com.au. The contributors are just as bad. Blackbourn waxes lyrical about old flathead Fords and I recently had to catch myself from ringing Faine to make him an offer on a Citroen.

You have to admire their passion, but what really scares me about this lot is, if you take any real notice of what they’re saying, by the end of the week you will have sold your house and be living in an old Fairlane while you wait for your new car museum/workshop to be built. And all of these nuts will see it a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Some days I can’t help thinking I should have listened to my parents and got a haircut and a real job…

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