Today's Best Car

Car 7 was a fantasy, an ambition, something that I had always wanted to try. My friend the dealer had taken a tatty looking Mercedes in as a part exchange. It was missing hub caps, had a horrible cheap body kit and a hole in the drivers seat. Now I might not have mentioned this before, but I’m a bit of a dreamer and to me I didn’t see a dirty sad old car, what I saw was a pretty, graceful solid old Mercedes which for was asking to be returned to it’s former glory, begging. A small amount of effort was all it would need to be returned to its former place at the classy end of the automotive world and maybe even return a small profit. Some hub caps, an original bumper and some cleaning and I could easily clear a $500 profit!

Well to cut a very long story short, I did put it back to its original state and I did enjoy cruising around in my Silver Arrow, steering the badge in the direction of an apex (and floating straight past it) and wafting along with the soft Mercedes ride, but only for a very short time. You see the restoration took about one year and during that time the car hardly moved. And that isn’t exactly good for a car… so on the day I decided to drive it to visit my parents, I decided to drive it hard, accelerating at full speed up Poulner Hill near Ringwood, was the day that I blew up the engine on my poor old Merc!

After a tow back home (thanks Dad – you seem to have spent a lot of your time towing your sons cars, although usually not mine) I decided to ditch the car and sell it for as much as I could get.

Oh well, a net loss and a valuable lesson but at least it paid for the party I threw to celebrate my upcoming move to the US!