Last issue I left you lot hanging a little by hinting that all had not been completely well on the W124 front. So it’s time to fess up.
You might remember that a few weeks ago, I had a head gasket replaced on the 260E. The engine was still running fine, but coolant had been disappearing for a while and a brown, sludgy goo was turning up in the coolant catch tank. A quick trip to a specialist mechanic not far from home saw the head gasket changed and the head pressure tested and skimmed. You might also remember that despite this six-cylinder engine having travelled its share of 225,000km, the bores were still beautiful, with a perfect cross-hatch still visible.
Back at home and I started putting a few tentative miles on the old dear and everything was looking rosy with no more coolant loss, no more gunge and an engine that was even smoother than before. And everything was sweetness and light. Until it wasn’t.
Typically, of course, the W124 decided to unleash its treachery on the worst possible day at the worst possible time. Think about the one thing an elderly Mercedes-Benz might be called upon to do where failure simply isn’t an option. Yep, wedding-car duties.
The step-daughter of a great mate of mine (whose head I had helped her dad wet almost 30 years ago) was getting hitched to a ripper bloke at another mate’s rural property an hour or so out of Melbourne. Would I drive her to the wedding? Of course I would. Be delighted, in fact.
So, on the Saturday morning, I picked up the bride and chief bridesmaid, slung them in the back of the Merc and tied a shiny white ribbon down from the A-pillars to the gunsight on the bonnet. Just like any wedding car. And off we set.
But about 15km into the 30km journey, I started noticing wet spots on the windscreen. And it wasn’t raining. Oh no. A check on the temp gauge confirmed it was inching upwards. I stopped, topped up the radiator and immediately noticed that a tiny little plastic elbow that joins the radiator top tank to the expansion tank had snapped. Call it 35 years of heat cycles. Call it rotten luck. But why, oh why today of all days?
We pressed on with the temp gauge getting closer to the danger zone but the engine still running properly. Meantime, in the back seat, the bride makes a slightly breathless call to her mum suggesting that a rescue may be required. I stopped again on the side of the road, using up the last of my water. But a nice lady watering her garden (how ironic) filled a watering-can for me and passed it over the fence. Some went in the radiator, the rest over the top tank.
a camera in my
darkest hour.
On we pressed, the needle still too high but not yet in the red zone. And finally, wheezing, gasping and with green coolant sprayed all over that lovely white ribbon, we staggered through the gate and into position to unload the official party. And there the bastard sat until the wedding was over and I’d had a beer or two and a wedding-spec feed and everybody was in a position to laugh it all off.
Fortunately, the bloke whose property we were using is a keen mechanic, so he had a well-stocked workshop which we plundered for gasket-goo, zip-ties and the tools to make a temporary repair. I left the radiator cap off for safety, but the car made it home no worries with the temperature never getting beyond 85 degrees.
But now, back home, I’m in that horrible situation where I don’t know if I’ve just cooked an engine I’d only just spent plenty on to have repaired. So I did what anybody would do, parked it up and forgot about it for a few weeks. Finally, though, I had to address the elephant in the driveway, so I checked all the hoses, checked our temporary repair (which I reckon is stronger than the original plastic shunt) filled her up with tap water, turned the key and went for a drive. And kept my fingers crossed the whole time.
The good news is that I’ve since put a couple of tanks of fuel through it on some pretty hot days and the thing has never got hot or seemed to use any coolant. The oil is spotless with no signs of coolant contamination, so I reckon I’ve dodged a bullet. It really rattled my faith in the old bugger, though, and even though we’ve kissed and made up, I’ll still be keeping a real close eye on things.
Meantime, I’ve mentioned all this to a few blokes with old cars, some of whom use theirs for wedding duties, too. And guess what? All of them have a similar story of a particular car picking the worst possible moment to do something dopey or malicious. At least you now know why brides are always late to their own weddings …
Meeting a hero
My quest to fill in my car-knowledge blanks continues. And again, a big thanks to you lot who have got in touch and offered me rides/drives in your precious machinery for no reward other than my endless gratitude. You all rock.
Anyways, one of the cars I mentioned that had slipped through the net for me was an XA or XB GT. Now, blagging a drive of a complete stranger’s $150,000 muscle car – a slice of Aussie motoring royalty – was always a big ask. But what happened is even more amazing.
I was contacted by a tremendous feller called Randall who makes his living sitting in big aeroplanes, but right at the very pointy end. Now, not only is Randall a confirmed car nut (he’s a Corvette man at heart) he is also the custodian of his dad’s car. A car his dad bought almost brand new, back in 1974.
His father, who made a living drilling holes in rocks for everything from water bores to places for miners to put sticks of gelignite, was a lover of USA iron, but was also suitably impressed by this car to snap it up from an Adelaide dealership when it was just six months old and was displaying just 6124 miles on its odometer.
The car is a 1973 XB GT351, but it’s actually way more interesting than that. For a start, as you can see, it’s a Hardtop which is cooler than a polar bear’s bum. But it’s also a factory auto (C4) has factory power-steer and factory air-con. Even stranger than that is the colour combo which runs to Tropical Gold with a brown interior that, by Randall’s reckoning, makes it one of just nine Tropical Gold Hardtops made in ’73. Now, on paper, gold over brown doesn’t sound too fabulous. But when you see it, holy cow. Seriously, this thing is more Saturday Night Fever than a tight suit and a shirt with ruffles. Randall’s dad gave the Hardtop the complete ’70s makeover by adding a set of fat Hotwires (is there a better wheel for this car? No.) rolling the guards and adding the Falcon script on the ducktail. Oh, and deleting the bonnet scoop the first owner added, which is why there’s a row of blocked-off holes down each side of the centre of the bonnet.
The GT clearly made an impression on Randall’s dad, too, because up to then, he’d always traded up every couple of years. Trade-ins included a Phase 2 GT-HO, and XA GT, so you can see how the XB fitted in. Thing is, though, Randall’s dad could never bring himself to part with the XB. Which is why, many decades later when dad’s time came, Randall inherited the car which now has just 64,000 original miles showing.
Now, as I’ve explained before, I’m happy to just ride shotgun, but Randall had no qualms about hurling me the XB’s keys as we headed out, about an hour west of Melbourne into, as it happens, the heartland of where Mad Max 1 was filmed. So what’s a ’73 XB GT Hardtop like to drive?
Well, you really can see and feel what the fuss was all about back then. Compared with just about anything else that was around for sensible money, the GT would have been a dead-set showstopper.
Given the low kays, the tightness of the chassis wasn’t a real surprise, but it was still a bit of an eye-opener to realise just how well a leaf-sprung rear end could ride.
Sure, there was a bit of body roll, but fundamentally, the big Falc was a pretty chilled sort of thing to punch into a corner. That said, the blokes who raced them for a living clearly had no shortage of agates.
The driveline obviously lacks the zap and fizz of a modern turbo-motor, but the one thing the Cleveland did not lack was flexibility. That made the kind-of-lazy gearbox make sense, too, because once that C4 had found its way up to top gear, there was never any reason to kick down that I could see. Probably the thing that dates the car the most is the steering.
The factory power-hook is more or less dreadful. Not that there’s a lack of stability or turn-in (those elements match the relaxed platform pretty well) but there’s an absolute lack of steering feel and steering weight. The helm can be controlled by one finger and the comatose response makes it feel like you’re steering a car with its front wheels in the air. I can see why not everybody in a Ford dealership ticked the box for power-steering back in 1973.
It all reminded me of a story my dad used to tell: When he was a copper in a small country town (with no hospital) in about 1975, the local publican had a heart attack. Rather than wait for an ambulance, dad jumped in the publican’s own, brand-new 351 LTD, stuck Old Mate on the back seat and headed for the next big town, about 40km away. For the rest of his life, dad would tell the yarn about the combination of the force of that Cleveland and the too-light power-steering. And how they were lucky they didn’t both have to be admitted to the hospital.
And maybe that’s why I enjoyed Randall’s car so much. Yeah, it’s very much a product of its time, but it is no less an Aussie legend for that. And any car that can remind you of your dad’s favourite yarns can’t be all bad, can it?
The man, the car, the legend
If you’ve been reading Aussie car magazines for any length of time, you’ll probably know this Jaguar E-Type. Yep, it’s probably the best-known, most photographed, most widely recognised E-Type in the country (without a doubt, actually). And if it does ring a bell, you’ll also know that it was the daily transport of the late Paul Cockburn, writer, film-maker, musician, industrial designer, genius and my mate of many years.
The car was a genuine part of Paul too, an extension of his personality and a statement that even good design could often be improved upon. Which is exactly what he did over the many decades he owned the roadster. The car has had at least three repaints – that I know of – and lord knows how many mechanical rebuilds across its 500,000-mile lifespan (true).
The most recent improvements came late in his life when Paul decided it would be fun to chase the 150mph mark that Jaguar had boasted of back in the day (achieved with a cheater car, it turns out). So, the motor was hotted up with Cockburn even trusting me to fit the triple Webers (which then proved to be a bitch to tune).
The stroke stayed at 106mm, but the bore was embiggened and high-compression slugs fitted. And to hear it idling now, you just know that it’s got a serious set of camshafts in there.
Will it do 150, then? We don’t know. Things got hectic and then Paul got ill, so the attempt was never made. But the smart money says it should stomp 150 pretty easy and march on to who-knows-how-fast.
The car is still owned by Paul’s family, but – bittersweet though it is – it needs to be sold. When Paul was first diagnosed, he told me that he didn’t want to will the car to anybody, as leaving such a capricious piece of equipment to the wrong person could ruin their life. So, according to those wishes, the car is now being prepared for sale.
If you want to see it in the flesh, it’ll be centre-stage at the Jaguar National Rally at Mount Panorama, Bathurst, from April 4 to 7.
Why don’t I buy it? Two reasons: First, I don’t have the requisite wedge burning a hole in my Hard Yakkas and, secondly, I reckon I’d wind up blubbering every time I got in it.
All I can hope is that whoever does wind up with it, understands its history and its importance to so many people who knew Cockburn, called him a friend, and understood they were dealing with a bona fide genius.