This was a great car bought for $599 in 1972. My Triumph Herald had been ordered off the road by then - yes, officially ordered off the road. One evening a traffic cop pulled me over and told me that he was going cross-eyed following me as the car seemed to be going sideways whilst going forward. It seems that the initial crash and a subsequent one where a milk tanker went into the back of it had twisted the chassis. This and the fact that the bonnet was held down by ropes made Mr Plod order me off the road. There wasn't a stickering system back then. He just made a record of it and said not to ever, ever put the car on the road again. It was a smaller community then in Wellington so sure as eggs if I did drive it I'd be caught. I advertised it in the paper as a 'buy for wrecking' deal. A guy came along and bought it for $100 (the wrecking yards offered me $30). He said he needed a car to drive to Napier to visit his girlfriend. I told him that it had been ordered off the road but he didn't care. I don't know if he made it or not.
You know, like those mysterious things that happen and you never hear of the outcome like when you threw that stone right up in the air in the playground and it came down amongst a crowd of kids and then an ambulance came and a kid was taken away and you never saw that kid again. Remember? .....
This was a great car. It just kept going and going. It travelled at a really good clip (Second remembers a trip through the South Island when we were going to Tony's wedding in Christchurch. 80 mph was sort of the norm).
Once when travelling from Wellington to Auckland, after filling up with petrol and oil at Te Kuiti we were as usual barrelling along at a pretty serious speed. I don't entirely recall everyone who was in the car but there was definitely Tony and Mike and one other, If the one other was Richard he would have been in the passenger seat, chain smoking and holding on to the dashboard with his eyes closed but as I was in the passenger seat it couldn't have been him. It might have been Noel who would have been sitting in the back seat wrapped up in an army surplus greatcoat several sizes too large for him and farting. Mike, a lovely guy, very intelligent and because of his good looks (well better than Richard's, Tony's and mine) was the front person to get us in to parties. His mechanical abilities were somewhat lacking though. It was he that, at one of the Wanganui Folk Festival weekends on a trip to Raetahi while the rest of us were sleeping in the car, drove all the way back with the handbrake fully engaged and burnt out the brakes. After checking the oil at the service station Mike failed to properly close the bonnet of the car.
A few miles down the road as Tony had the car up to our normal cruising speed (about 70 mph), the view in front of us suddenly changed from this:
to this:
Holy shit!
Have we gone blind?
Is there a snow storm?
No. The bonnet of the car had flown up totally obscuring the windscreen. After a few seconds Tony and I realised what had happened and he wound down the drivers window and stuck his head out while I leaned horizontally to look through the tiny space between the bottom of the windscreen and the bottom of the bonnet to direct him along the road until we could stop. We made a wobbly couple of hundred yards on both sides of the main highway before safely pulling over to the side of the road. Our hearts were hammering and it took a few minutes for us to regain our composure.
If a logging truck or nay other traffic had been coming the other way we would have been toast. Certainly if this had happened on a corner we would have gone off the road. Lucky I guess.
3 comments:
I remember riding in the front passenger seat as you drove back to Wellington from Mangaweka.
There was only the two of us in the car.
I was falling asleep, but you told me that if I fell asleep, you would too.
It seemed like we travelled for days!
That was in the Hillman.
The Hillman Minx was a geat car. My dad had a 61 Minx and a 72 Hillman Hunter.
I wonder, did NZ make their own cars at this time, or import them from Uassie or UK?
The components were imported from UK.
Hillmans and Chryslers were assembled at Todd Motors in Petone.
Fords (UK) assembled at Fords in Seaview.
I assume Holdens were imported from OZ and assembled somewhere
Assembling meant local labour, painting and fitting of components manufactured locally like seats , carpets, trim electricals etc. The big stuff was all imported. I worked a summer at Todd's.
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