Wee Irish fella blocking my route to work!

Bloody Bernie Ecclestone's mob are ruining my walk to work!

As I may have mentioned before I'm doing rather a lot of walking/running at the moment in preparation for a ***monster endurance event***.

Training includes walking to work through Albert Park, home of the Melbourne Grand Prix. Most of the year of course this is just a great big park with some curvy bits of road. There are cricket pitches, dogs, etc. The pit stop buildings are used as a sports halls (how Australian!).

The last couple of weeks it's been madness though, lorries coming and going. It's making walking to work relatively hazardous, but it is interesting to see just how much preparation goes into setting the venue up.

The Grand Prix is the same weekend i'm doing the 100km walk ... in about six weeks' time.

Anyway here's some (poor quality) phone photos of the preparation.

Not often you see a ticket maching next to the pit lane is it?

Or such slow
corners on a racetrack? (they're thinking about a Le Mans style start this year apparently...)

Here's the inside of the pit garages. If you look closely you can see a piece of Schumacher's old chewing gum on the floor.

This guy looked like he was a bit over the whole thing

Chrome blind in the sunshine

It was a lovely sunny day today, perfect weather for a Triumph concours - if you like that sort of thing. I always get a bit bored looking at shiny cars, most of which never get dirty or red-lined, but I'd originally hoped to meet up with a CT forum member called Glen (or Cowman on the forum). However, he was called to Country Fire Authority duty fighting fires just north of Melbourne. I hope that's all going well for him.

So I went along anyway, even washing BOB first - that's twice this year already!

Unsurprisingly there were lots of shiny TRs and Stags, plus a Vitesse, 12/50 Herald a few Sptifires and GT6. There was a line up of competition cars, too:



I didn't hang around for the concours announcements but the car of the show IMHO was this TR Italia - nice:



There were quite a few saloons around, including an LPG with L plates, and this purple one! (not a big fan of colour-coding myself).



There was only one Mk1 that I noticed. It was white, like so many others, but had a rather unusual take on EFI under the hood...





After half an hour or so I was getting chrome blindness as usual and ready to head home. Then I met a fella called Fraser who was sheltering from the sun next to his standard tune Mk2 TC that he runs at hillclimbs all over the state.


Before I knew it we'd been waffling away for over an hour about all things Triumph and I was getting increasingly keen on the idea of a bit of hillclimbing/sprint action. I know I've been saying this for a while, but I've been put off by the assumption i'd need to cross and dot all kinds of scrutineering Ts and Is ... but Fraser's experience seems to have been quite simple: a licence, a helmet, a fire extinguisher (already in place anyway) and I'm certified to go and risk my own life as much as I like in time trial based tomfoolery... whyever not?

Strange goings on

You expect summer in Australia to be hot, but it's been ridiculous these past couple of weeks - the complete opposite of what's been going on in the UK.

Three days in a row last week it was over 40 centigrade. It stayed in the thirties for the next week. We didn't have a drop of rain in the whole of January. It's really stressing the flora and fauna. Leaves everywhere have been turning brown and leaping off trees, grass is crunching underfoot like snow, I've seen dead birds all over the place.

Today was mental. The mercury just tipped 50 this afternoon! Then a cool change came through and I even saw a couple of drops of rain outside. It's due to plummet to a chilly 23 tomorrow.

Stranger than the weather was seeing two TR6 on my way to work last Wednesday. I crossed Albert Park Road (of Melbourne Grand Prix fame) and saw the back of a red TR6 heading up the street. Thirty seconds later on a side road I saw another one. I know red TR6 are pretty common but this was spooky. I spoke to the owner of the second - turned out he'd literally just finished its restoration and he was in the process of posting the registration documents.

But there was nothing to prepare me for finding a familiar face hanging around at Flinder's Street Station in the centre of Melbourne. Young Paul Darbyshire (aka Burnerboy) the serial Triumphaholic and all-round nice guy. Even better was that he had a bag of Chris Witor springs to go with his cheeky smile.



Well, that deserved a beer ... or two! So we snuck off to the pub to launch the first ever Club Triumph Melbourne meeting. Paul won the points for travelling the furthest to attend, but I was in my 10CR 03 t-shirt so I think that makes it evens. He says he'll be back again some time for another meeting... I might have to think up some quiz questions.