Drives of your life

WHAT'S the greatest drive you've done? I don't mean those family road trips.

Lotus Cortina

WHAT'S the greatest drive you've done? I don't mean those family road trips where the kids and the dog puke in the back after a sack of double cheeseburgers and chips.

No, I mean that drive you did by yourself. Maybe what made it great was the car, the road, the day, the night, the speed or the music. One of my greatest drives was cracking the old ton - 100mph (160km/h) - for the first time on the newly opened Newcastle expressway in an MGA twin cam. My worst drive was later that afternoon when the engine exploded.

I got thinking about all this while reading Mel Nichols's And The Revs Keep Rising (I paid $40 from Pitstop Bookshop). Mel was a former deputy editor of Wheels, editor of Sports Car World and long-time editor of Car magazine. The book is a collection of his 40 best stories driving supercars in the 1970s and 80s.

Mel's classic tale is from October 1976, when he and a few friends delivered three Lamborghinis from Modena to London. Those were the days when the gendarmes didn't arrest you for doing 260km/h but called the rest of the squad to lovingly look over the cars.

Listen to Mel talking about the Paris to Lille section: "I was with Roger in the Countach. We were running at around 190km/h. In the mirror Roger saw a Jaguar XJ-S closing fast.

"Cold-bloodedly, he changed down to fourth and opened the Countach right up. It surged ahead with force, and precisely as the Jaguar came alongside, we had matched its speed at 250km/h.

"We went into top gear again as 8000rpm came up, the throttle still open, and we left the XJ-S as if it were standing still. When the clock was showing 290km/h, we were forced to lift off."

My great drives have mainly been in modern US classics on that wonderful US freeway system where the only time a cop has pulled me over was to have a chat about the Ford GT that I was doubling the speed limit in.

The others have been rented from that great home of American muscle machines, Hertz, which in the US will let you loose in a beast from its Adrenaline Collection.

Take your pick of Corvettes, Mustangs, Camaros and Challengers.

Mel rates our very own Ford Falcon GT-HO Phase III among the top 10 cars he has driven. The Ferrari 250 GTO comes in No 1 with six other European cars filling out the list. Showing how much England has turned him, his other three classics are the Mclaren F1, the Jaguar D-type and, get ready to cry, the Range Rover.

But I have one really deep yearning. In my early 20s all I really wanted was a Lotus Cortina and the only place I wanted to drive it was around Mount Panorama.

The only thing that stopped me was money. This year Bonhams is auctioning the ex-Sir John Whitmore European Touring Car Championship-winning 1965 Lotus Cortina Competition for somewhere around $170,000. I have already been to see the bank manager.