My first car, first skid and the evidence in a jar.

Chasing a bottled burnout (teenage edition)

I was unhappily standing in the sun, watching the most boring game of football in my life. I hated that my brother loved football so much because now we all had to suffer, it became our every Saturday. But that field nearly became our whole weekend.

On Friday nights it held our Little Athletics meets and Sundays we would come down and let the dog play with us and the football. But Saturdays they were long. There was the pre game warm up, the waiting, the first quarter, second and then half time and then another two quarters and then the recap.

Occasionally I was lucky enough to get something from the shop, highly forbidden on most days, but it would depend on how distracted my parents were. This one day was different.

During the pre game warm up my father left me with my mother, I thought it odd as he never leaves. As a child, I was not privy to the reason why and had to come to my own conclusions, which I had none, I just assumed it would have to be work related or my mother had pissed him off somehow.

It was only toward the end of that very long football game, that my father returned (he had to anyway, he took the car). He came over to where my mother and I were sitting with this huge grin on his face. There was not many times that I saw this look so I was deeply suspicious of what was happening.

‘ oh petsy, why would you do that?’

My mother had her disapproving look on her face and of course the “oh petsy, why did you do that”. Her standard judging tone of a decision that he had made. I had to know what was going on. So I asked. “What’s happened and why are you smiling like that?”

My mother had to butt in and answer the question, “your father decided to purchase a car from California, sight unseen and have it shipped over here. Who knows what state it is in, but it was found in some old backyard. It doesn’t work and it will cost a lot of money to fix.”

All I heard was California, something from overseas that you have not seen, thats kinda exciting. But the smile on my fathers’ face was not from the purchase, but from the news that it had arrived.

My nosiness required eyes on it, and it did not take long until I was in the passenger seat and on the way to where the car was currently sitting. My fathers friend imported vehicles from USA as his main job, mostly Mustangs which was extremely lucrative at this time.

My father did not purchase a Mustang though, it was a Thunderbird, I’d never heard of it before but why would I, I barely knew the car I was in even though my father worked at a car dealership.

As we arrived at this guys house, my jaw dropped at the amount of cars on this property, they were everywhere, pretty much all Mustangs of every age and every condition you could imagine and then I saw it… and it became my first love.

A 1967 Mach 1 Mustang. The shape, the way it looked at you. Like it was tough but also sexy. I had never seen anything like it. Walking around hopping in these cars and imagining in 8 years when I would be driving, that it would be one of these cars.

And that’s where it all started. My love of a piece of machinery started there and whilst sometimes dormant, led me through most of my life.

How did we get from there to a burnout?

That love of cars grew, I was the child that helped my father with his Thunderbird project where I could. I was also the one who wanted to go to all the car shows, the speedway, the drags, the show and shine, the greazefest, the indy all of it. And since my father worked in the car industry we often had VIP or special perks by proxy.

Like the pace car for the Indy, we had it first. The cars that were driven by the celebrities in the races around the track, we had them first. The first of models of certain cars in Australia, we had it first. Even special signatures from well known drivers, we had that first.

And even with two brothers I was the only one who ever really showed enough interest in any of it.

But once I was of age and driving my first car (which of course was parent approved, an old lady’s car that was only driven on Sundays rocking an old AM radio) I still wanted to be that very first car I had ever seen, that had started my love of vehicles. That was how I wanted to feel and build the life around me, was how I saw that car.

I went to car meets, only hung around boys and attached myself to everything that I thought was cool at the time. Including getting my parents to buy another house that they could rent to me and I could house the “king” of the burnouts in our local neighbourhood.

But once we had our very own 7–11 built into our neighbourhood, there was fresh carpark that was just waiting to be marked with the obligatory tyre marks.

This was my suburb, so it was only fair to let me, with my stock 4 cylinder church on Sundays car, to do the first skid.

As the boys pushed up and down on the back of the car, my foot shifting between the accelerator and the brake, I prayed to the gods to let there be smoke.

There was not enough power in this poor little engine to make enough torque to bring forward that friction between the rubber and the bitumen. I needed those boys to bounce that girl up and down like she had never bounced before, my foot flat on the accelerator and the brake at the same time knowing that a miracle would need to occur.

As the clouds parted and the moon shined down on my forehead… I felt a shift.

I felt the way the rubber meeting the floor underneath. I could feel the tension, then I could hear the noise and then the smoke, cheers bellowing from the boys all around me.

I was doing my first burnout!

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When I went over to admire my handiwork, I saw how much rubber was on the ground. I went back to the car, tipped out my jar of gold coins and used it to scoop all that rubber up and keep it as a reminder of that one time I was cool.

Many tyres were harmed in the making of this story.

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