DADDO’S EVERYDAY DRIVER

The first was a gap car, the kind that fills the void between your first shit box and your next good thing, you know? I’d just got back from a year in America and it was practically free. Character in every panel, a solid 186 and beautiful cherry red Prem interior. The rear main seal could have leaked for Australia.

Insert a sensible Subaru wagon, and there was a yearning to get back to something cool. Oh, yeah. HR number 2, epic in every way. Fats and mags and a bullet proof motor you could run dry without worrying if she’d come back to life after a quick guzzle of preferred oil.

And then this one. The best one. Special. Purchased on ebay from the Sutherland Shire from a bloke who got it from another bloke who’d stolen it from some geologist bloke who hacked it up and down the Kimberly for years: it was full of red dust and little red rocks.

As soon as I drove it, I knew. What a box. What a donk. What a body. The rust wasn’t really a problem, until it was. And even then, there was the Trusty Rusty up the road who’d take care of it, no worries.

No worries for him, anyway. I knew something was cactus when I noticed the paint brush bristle in the paint. He swore black and blue he hadn’t just cut and bogged it. But, of course he had. And if I was harboring a malignant mistrust of Trusty Rusty and his ilk, I tried hard not to show it.

The dream was to bring the Special back to new. But damn that Trusty Rusty for messing with my head. He’s the problem for anyone wanting to restore a car, because inevitably we go to someone like that first, get a crap job at a hot price and fear treading back into the fray forever after.

For folks like me, it’s a world we think we should understand, but often fall short.

Did you bog it?

‘Nup.’

‘You’re sure.’

‘Yep.’

‘If I put a magnet in the bottom of that door, will it stick?’

‘Nup.’

‘Because you bogged it?’

‘Nup. Used a new paint. Repels everything. Didn’t even charge ya.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep.’

Then you go home, put a magnet on it and it doesn’t stick and you tell your best car mate and he punches you in the guts and laughs at you for being a dick.

So, when the chance came around to have the car fixed ‘properly’ you can imagine my excitement, and trepidation.

Would it be properly, or would it be a little hokey? Like, would they cable tie the back window onto its shelf, or would they do it properly? Would it leak oil even after the rear main had been re-roped, or not? Am I buying into building a shitbox that will dissolve like an Aspro in the first rain, or is it fair bloody dinkum?

Turns out it was fair dinkum, but not without a little fear thrown in.

For one, it took a long time. Why? Because it takes a long time to do things properly. In the back of my mind the fear was coming back. Am I ever going to see your face again? I thought. If I call and ask questions will you rush it and stuff it up? What’s going on? I scoured the Instagram shots on RestoMyRide to see if my baby was in the background and what state she was in.

Sometimes she was. Under a tarp with the front end missing. Where’s the front end gone?

Alas, imagination is a funny thing, and it often works against us. The damage Trusty Rusty had done on my trust meter was going to need work, and Resto My Ride may well have been the antidote. ‘It’s coming,’ purred Dec, with his course Irish accent. ‘Want it lowered?’

Lowered? Colored? Bagged up so I can dump it on arrival at the coffee shop to make everyone go “yowzah!” So many questions and the realization I really was out of my league in terms of making something out of a car fast approaching nothing.

In the end, though. When push came to shove, Dec did the easiest, and probably the hardest thing. He brought my special back to Special – the Bruce Macaveney kind of Speeeeeeshall. It’s a thing of beauty, a head turner, a memory twigger. A chance to stand back and tell your kids, ‘Your dad had one of those.’

I’ll never go to a Trusty Rusty again. Not ever.