Mark Dapin: On (and off) the road with ‘Australia’s worst driver’

IT’S not often I get a dream assignment in journalism these days. It’s not often I get an assignment at all. But I had a message last week from the editor of a travel magazine, who wanted to know if I might be interested in driving Supercars around France. Yes, as a matter of fact, I would.

Yes I’d like to drive a Supercar. No, I don’t have a licence. Picture: Craig Wilson

IT’S not often I get a dream assignment in journalism these days. It’s not often I get an assignment at all. But I had a message last week from the editor of a travel magazine, who wanted to know if I might be interested in driving Supercars around France. Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. There’s only one small problem: I don’t have a driver’s licence. When I admit this to strangers, they immediately think I once had a licence but lost it, most likely due to drink driving.

But actually, I’ve just never passed the test.

I don’t look like someone who can’t drive (whatever they might look like). I look more like a truck driver. This only adds to people’s bewilderment. It’s as if they’d met a person with two legs who is standing up at the bar while insisting he can’t walk.

They want to know “why” I failed.

I’m just inadequate, I suppose.

For the record, I’ve failed seven different times, for seven different reasons. These range from driving so slowly that I showed no respect for other road users to driving so fast that I showed no respect for human life (this is in two successive tests).

Over the years, the fact I can’t drive has been a source of fascination to various magazine editors. I wrote several stories about it for Wheels magazine.

The most memorable (for me, at least) involved driving across the Nullarbor as part of a motoring journalists’ junket sponsored by Audi. Every day, each journalist drove a different model from Audi’s fleet, with a public relations person sitting next to them in the car.

Audi simply didn’t believe that Wheels would send a learner driver along, and were perplexed when I insisted on buying magnetic L-plates and attaching them to my vehicle. I think they were waiting for a Candid Camera moment where I stumblingly started up the car (perhaps mistakenly jamming the key into the door instead of the ignition) then tore off like Lewis Hamilton and drove 50m on two wheels or something.

The Audi R8

The joke that they were expecting was that I’d be an expert driver in disguise. But the actual joke was that I was completely bloody useless. When I began my journey, the PR said, “You really can’t drive, can you?”.

I asked what had made her realise that, and she replied that I had pulled out on to Highway 1 without looking in either direction.

Maybe you’re starting to get the picture.

Wheels really enjoyed the story (Audi less so) and commissioned me to write another piece about my next driving test. It was a disaster, as always, and Wheels asked of its readers the (rhetorical) question, “Is this Australia’s Worst Driver?”

The readers enthusiastically agreed with the proposition, and one man wrote in suggesting I be sterilised so as not to pass down my appalling driving genes to the next generation.

But even this humiliation wasn’t enough. Next, the magazine sent me to report on the V8 Supercars in Adelaide, secure in the knowledge that I had no idea what the event was about. I arrived, chatted with drivers, stood in the pits, and generally watched with bafflement as the cars just sort of raced around in big, futile loops, like impatient drivers in the CBD looking for a parking space.

The editor credited my report to “Australia’s worst motorsports journalist” or some such.

Many years later, I still meet people who remember those stories. Not long ago, I was writing about a grieving father whose son had been killed while fighting for the Australian Army in Afghanistan. His heart was in pieces but he still got a chuckle out of the fact he was being interviewed by Australia’s worst driver.

So I guess it has done some good for somebody.

I’ve just come back from a driving holiday in the US and Canada. Of course, my partner did the driving; I just did the “holiday” bit. Since she bought a GPS, I don’t even have to navigate (and I’m almost as good a navigator as I am a driver). I just sit back and enjoy the view, and maybe have a little drink now and again.

Back home, I never have to be the designated driver, and I don’t have to run the kids to sports. I don’t need to worry if the bloke next door has parked in our space, or if the driver in front is an (insert random insult here). But the best thing about not driving is probably the fact that we don’t have to pay to run two cars.

So there are upsides to everything, but I’m finding it difficult to see them now, when I could be in France.