Monday, October 19, 2009

Rules of life for young men in the Barossa.

When you turn 16 you rush out and buy a Commodore V8. Nothing older than a VS is accepted. At that age you automatically acquire driving knowledge to the level of F1. At roughly the same time your mum and dad's driving expertise suddenly declines to the level of "f***ing dickhead". They should learn to keep their mouths shut. If you survive the rigors of Friday night and are out of bed by mid-afternoon on Saturday, your time should be well spent removing the pristine mags on the rear of the said Commodore and replacing them with the black steel rims and second-hand tyres in readiness for an evening of drunken burnouts. And if you survive the burnouts relatively unscathed you will be too exhausted from all that hard work to put the car away. Therefore on Sunday morning there will be these Commodores parked all over town with silly looking black steel wheels on the back, many with burst tyres. The local cops mistakenly think that because of those wheels on the back that you might know how those ridiculous black marks got on the streets and out on the road. Those cops are so dumb that they don't even realise that you have fitted the wheels for their aesthetic appeal.

Yesterday morning Andrew and I went over to Collingrove for the State Hillclimb Championships. Coming down the hill from Penrice into Angaston (a 50kph zone) we round a bend to discover this, a once pristine Commodore complete with steel rims on the back and a blown tyre and a skid mark that veers across the road to the opposite kerb and then sharply back to the other footpath. After narrowly missing the stobie pole (due, no doubt, to the aforementioned expertise), the driver has endeavoured to reverse back on to the road only to dig a hole with the left-hand rear wheel so deep that it sat the diff down on the kerb. The next step is to go home and try and get some sleep before the sun comes up. Surely someone will have rescued the car before you wake up.

2 comments:

Colin said...

Rules of life for all testosterone fired up young bucks.

Many of us were lucky to live through our stupidity and many did not.

Part of life, luck and natural selection I guess.

Everyone does something stupid while they are growing up just most of us have luck on our side and we survive.

'Party tyres" were a part of life 40 years ago for those of us who had powerful cars. The lack of a locked diff or LSD usually meant the smoking tyre was on one side of the car only

One of life's joys was covering a hairdresser in their MGB with tyre smoke as you blew them away at the lights.

Members of a certain car club used to race their cars to AIR, race at AIR and then race all the way home.

Remember Hill Street Mitcham. I remember a certain member of that club turning a T junction into a through road in their yellow coupe.

That tree stump got awfully close to his knackers.

Ouch does not bear thinking about.

Colin said...

When you're young, you think that old people are born into old age... ain't going to happen to you! You feel free to criticize them without out ever thinking that they only difference between you and them is a finite number of ticks on a clock. The final truth comes as quite a surprise.