My Little Festiva Did Bathurst

In 1996, I was young and had no idea about loans, owing money or cars, not necessarily in that order. So one day whilst sitting on a non air conditioned, filthy, late commuter train crammed next to someone who smelt like piss and another who thought they were Jesus Christ and mumbling about setting themselves alight I decided it was high time I got a car. So I made one phone call to my old man who told me to get something small, economical and of course a Ford.

So I trotted off to City Ford because they said "Yes More Often" and of course I skidded out in debt with a brand new $18,000 motor vehicle without power steering because it would have been an extra $2,000 and I didnt think I needed it. That power steering decision is one of the few life decisions I deeply regret. It would have saved me such anguish and back pain when trying to park the thing and an awful amount of swearing would not have happened on my part had it been installed. People would be shocked at how heavy the steering was in such a tin can.

As far as spec's are concerned, the festie never got over 60km per hour, but could burn the highway at 100km per hour any more than that and the thing shook like the space shuttle taking off. Generally I could plant my foot to the floor and literally go know here. If you lent into any of the panels or slammed the door with your hand to hard you were off to the panel beaters with a nasty dent. Apart from these set backs the air conditioning was fantastic in summer when it would spit little bits of ice out of the air vents from time to time and in winter it would get so hot I would have to roll open a window. Note I say roll down a window, nothing was power, not the locks or the windows or the fucking steering. Still I loved that car, it gave me more than ten years driving pleasure especially being a two door when you would pick up a passenger and they would always crack their head bending into the back seat, no matter how many times you yelled "Watch your head". It certainly was a good dickhead test, if they cracked their head then you knew they weren't much in the brains department, probably because half of them were left on the top door frame.

So with the annual Bathurst car race on last weekend my old man and I discussed the In's and outs of the race track. I told him I had toured the festie round the track at one stage and how she had faired. Poorly. Going up the straight no problem, heading up the hill, flat to the floor and revving like a demon, coming down the dipper I thought both myself and the car would shit ourselves and then returning to the start and seeing a ten year old on foot lap us. Nice huh. Still the Festie is now a distant memory with it being superseded by the Subaru which in a nutshell is fucking brilliant. The downside to seeing the Festie go was the fact I lost $100 cash out the deal.

You see dear reader I had a secret magnet under the front bumper bar with an emergency stash of money and house and car keys for times when I would lock myself out of either the car or house or both. Believe me I had to replace the $100 plenty of times because I had fallen foul of something or another and I cannot count how many times I slid under the car to get my secret key out because I had locked mine in the car. Whose the dickhead now huh? So it wasn't until many months after the car was gone that I woke one night at 3am to the disturbing memory reminder that I had left the secret magnet with my secret $100 cash in it. FUCK is all I could say. So if you see a claret coloured Ford Festiva number plate QNW-286 then there is 100 smackers under the bumper and oh how I check every claret coloured Festiva now in the hope it will yield my lost cash.

Note: If you look closely at the photo you will see a very expensive wooden racing steering wheel. This was compliments of a friend who felt the car needed jazzing up, I use the word jazzing in refusal to say the word pimping because it shits me. In any case it got a lot of people laughing but it was quite nice to the touch. And for those of you who are really car smart you will notice the Mazda hub caps, these were thanks to a friend who would knock them off from Mazda for me where he worked because I constantly used my hub caps as a way to monitor when I was going to hit a curb when parking. On one occasion whilst waiting in traffic on King Street a young boy about 6 or 7 stopped and started yelling to the whole street about the fact I had Mazda hub caps on a Ford Festiva. Thankfully people didn't question why but where more amazed at how he would know such a car detail so young.