If you’ve been playing at home, you’ll know that the cooling system on my W124 Benz is giving me the absolute irrits.
If it aint a leaking head gasket, it’s a broken plastic fitting or a kaput heater hose. Doesn’t seem to matter what I do, every time I fix something, something else goes pop a few days later. Who could forget the plastic fitting that decided it had had enough on the very day I have a blushing bride in the back-seat on the way to her wedding?
So I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised the other day when the temp gauge started to head north yet again. Of course, I’m so used to this happening now, I continually drive around in the old crate with one eye on that mongrel orange temp needle.
Which means that the when the malevolent bastard attempted to stiff me most recently, I was on to it almost before the needle had started to shift. Pull over, shut her down, open the boot and drag out the five-litre bottle of spare water, top up and stagger the last couple of kliks home. And no harm done.
Of course, the first thing I went looking for was the source of the latest coolant calamity. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to spot the radiator hose that had split about 40mm down from the jubilee clamp securing it to the rest of the boat anchor.
Now, before you all pile on and berate me for not changing an obviously old set of hoses, allow me to explain that I had previously tried to obtain a new set of rad hoses with absolutely no luck. Not available at my local parts shop and not even an online listing that I could rely on to be accurate, since I had no part number reference.
Of course, now I either abandon the car altogether or get serious about finding a new set of hoses. The thing is, the Merc is such a gorgeous old gadget to pilot when it’s not puking its ethylene glycol everywhere, and gives me such a huge case of the grins, that I can’t bear to set it on fire and walk away. So I’m going after a set of radiator hoses. How hard could it be? Spare me …
I started with hitting the parts stores again. And, again, no dice bud. My mates at my local Bursons told me that their hose suppliers no longer have a listing for that bit of that car. Helpfully, he let me sort through a huge wall of hoses in the shop to see if I could find one that was right. But, Benz being Benz, the bottom hose is a weird shape and the top hose has different sizes outlets end-to-end. Typical.
So I try a Repco. Nope, same story, but the bloke behind the counter reckons that maybe he could order me a set of hoses if I could find the part numbers.
“Don’t you have a hose catalogue under the counter there,” I ask.
“Nah, they got thrown out years ago,” says Matey. That’d be Matey 2.
O-k-a-y. So it’s starting to look like I might be about to take a spiritual – and probably fiscal – hiding on this one.
I regroup and move to a Mercedes specialist not far from the MBC. I wander up to the parts counter and pose my question.
“Do you have the car’s VIN?” Matey 3 wants to know.
“Nope, but it’s a 1990, 260E, W124, M103 engi…”
“Can’t help you without a VIN,” she says (yep, Matey 3 is a lass).
“At all?”
“At all.”
I turn and walk away. Seems odd, but surely, this must be an isolated case. Ha!
Now I’m getting worried. So I tap up a few of the blokes lurking around the Mercedes-Benz Club’s workshop (which is in the same industrial estate as the MBC); eBay, says one. Or a Mercedes dealership, suggests a second fella.
I sit down at my computer and tap into the wonderful world of eBay. But unless I’m prepared to pay through the nose for postage and wait for weeks for the bits to come from Bulgaria (if they even exist) I’m screwed.
Sticking with the M-B Club blokes’ advice, I ring the nearest Mercedes dealership and get myself transferred to the parts department. I explain what I want and then hear Matey 4 utter the terrible words: “Have you got a VIN?”
Finally conceding that nobody, anywhere understands what a 1990 W124 looks like, I stagger down to the shed when I get home, pop the bonnet on the 260, and scribble down the VIN. Next day, I’m back on the blower to the same M-B dealership. Matey 5 picks up the call and I start to give him the car’s details.
“It’s a 1990 model, March build, W124, 260 …”
Matey 5 cuts me off with: “Totally irrelevant, mate. What’s the VIN?”
I briefly think about educating the galoot that such info is not irrelevant, but is, rather, a way of cross-referencing the information so that we both understand what parts I’m after and for what car. But I don’t. Instead, I recite the VIN to him.
“Hmm,” he says over the sound of computer keys being pressed, “I can get you the top hose out of Malaysia. Be about three weeks and 70 bucks. But the bottom hose I have no supplier for. But if I could get it, it’d be about $270.”
“Forget it mate, at that rate the car is a write-off.”
Getting increasingly concerned that my beautiful 260E will never hit the road again for want of half a metre of moulded rubber, I hit the internerd and this time focus on auto parts suppliers near me. I track down one who has an online listing for the upper hose and hit the phone.
“Yep,” says Matey 6, “I can get you the top hose, but the bottom one is AWOL. But have you tried XYZ Auto Parts? I reckon they’ll have what you want.”
Sensing victory may not be far away, I look up XYZ’s phone number and try my luck.
“Yep, got both those on the shelf,” confirms Matey 7.
“Great,” I’ll take ’em. Where do I find you?”
“Ah, mate, we don’t do retail.”
“Okay, but I’m happy to pay the retail price. I’m just trying to keep an old car on the road.”
Now Matey 7 starts to get a bit shirty, figuring I’m having a go at him.
“Look, mate, all it takes is one bad apple,” he (kind of) explains.
I’m not sure how me giving them money and them giving me the hoses has anything to do with fruit of any sort, but I can see I’m not getting anywhere.
“So, if I’m not a mechanical workshop, you can’t sell me the parts, yeah?”
“That’s right. I can’t quote you a price, either.”
“But if I got my mate who runs a workshop to order the hoses, you’d sell them to him.”
“Yep.”
“Okay, then that’s what I’ll do. But just as a cross-check, can you give me the part numbers?”
“Nope, can’t tell you that.”
“Sorry …”
“I can’t give you the part numbers.”
“Why not?”
“It’s our policy.”
“Okay.” Click. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr. Jackass.
Next morning, I schlepp around to my mate’s workshop and ask very nicely if he’d do me a solid and order these damn parts from XYZ with whom he, conveniently, already has an account. Three hours later, and my pal phones me to say the parts are sitting on his counter. “Come and get ’em. And you owe me forty-eight bucks.”
Can you believe this stuff? Not only were they on the shelf at the place that wouldn’t sell them to me, they were also about $300 cheaper than I was being quoted by the Benz dealership. Who, by the way, couldn’t guarantee supply.
Later that arvo, I had the new hoses fitted and was test driving the old girl to make sure everything was spot on and to burp the cooling system to purge it of air.
And that’s when the second plastic elbow broke.
And I swear on a stack of bibles, I am not making a single word of this up. I mean, you couldn’t, right?
Show us the racing, dammit
Here’s another thing I’m having trouble believing other than the fact that I witnessed it in real time: A couple of weeks ago, the Grand Prix was held in Melbourne. And, not too surprisingly, Melbourne turned on its trademark weather by producing a Saturday in the high-30s, followed by raceday in the low teens with a howling wind and rain coming in not just sideways, but upside-down.
Now, when I was racing HQs many, many years ago, I’d be out in the paddock doing a rain dance before every race. Since my home-built engine wasn’t quite as potent as some of the pro-built cars on the grid, I soon discovered that a bit of rain was the great leveller, and suddenly, I was competitive. So you can imagine my joy at the prospect of a wet F1 race to watch on the telly.
ad break!
And it was all turning out super-entertaining when, at about three-quarters race distance, the heavens opened and the Albert Park circuit got a proper dunking. By now, I’m glued to the TV, waiting for a slew of pit stops for wet tyres and the inevitable shake-up in the race order as team tacticians tried to guess when to box their cars and make the switch to grooved rubber.
But guess what happened just then? Yep, Channel 10 went to a freaking ad break. Yes, yes, I know, they keep a live feed of the race going in a small corner of the screen (very small in the case of my telly) but there’s no commentary and no way I could follow what was going on.
By the time the adverts for health insurance, pile cream and house ads for Channel 10’s own shows(!) were done, Hamilton had gone from first to ninth, Norris was back in front, there was chaos in the pits and everybody was slippin’ and slidin’ around on a greasy track. And I missed the lot of it.
The most bizarre element of this is that the commentators knew all hell was about to break loose, us mugs watching it knew as much and, you’d have to imagine, the blokes back at Channel 10 pulling the levers and pushing the buttons knew as well. So why go to a bloody ad break right then?
Can you imagine what would have happened if the telecast of a footy match went to an ad-break just as Macca was lining up to boot the match-winner after the siren? Yep, there’d be a riot. So why not treat motor-sport viewers with the same respect?
I know I’ve complained about the length and timing of ad breaks in motor-sport telecasts before, but this one was just inexplicable. To me, it illustrates the disregard TV networks have for anything other than the bottom line.
Even the fill-in bits of the telecast where a B-grade celeb interviews a C-grader to learn how ‘electric’ the atmosphere is, grind my gears. Not to mention that until this weekend, the C-grader in question thought that F1 was some kind of SMS code for their favourite ex-partner.
Listen networks, if you can’t do the sport justice, leave it to somebody who can.