Gift of lifetime for petrolheads

Nathan has been sitting beside me in the Radical passenger's seat, learning by watching as I take him around Eastern Creek.

130921 wap V8

So I said to Nathan: 'You're starting to do OK on the tarmac; what you need is a bit of dirt experience.' Nathan has been sitting beside me in the Radical passenger's seat, learning by watching as I take him around Eastern Creek. The experience must be making him wiser because his 25-year-old hair has gone grey and his language has become a lot more robust.

Nathan Antunes does need my help, despite winning his first race aged nine, driving in Europe in Formula BMW and Formula 3, and racing for Australia in the A1 Grand Prix. So off we went to the Colo Park rally course, our equivalent of the La Bollene-Vesubie to Sospel section of the Monte Carlo Rally.

I paid RallySchool.com.au $895 to spend a day teaching Nathan soil skills in a couple of Subarus and an Evo. His hair was even greyer by the end of the day. Also coaching on the day was classic rally champion Fro Horobin and co-driver Greggy McPherson.

If you haven't driven a rally car, the RallySchool course (available in most states) is a great experience and a good start to decide whether you want to do more. The cars are in great shape, the course is challenging and the instructors are serious rally people.

After a day on the dirt, I said to Nathan: "Now let's go down to Sandown and drive V8s." Motoring editor Phil King has banned Nathan's answer but the fact I went to Melbourne by myself shows he wasn't enthusiastic.

Racer Rod Dawson and former XXXX executive Greg Evans started V8 Race 23 years ago with three Falcon V8s at Brisbane's Lakeside track. Today, the duo has 26 Holdens and Falcons and run drive days at every V8 Supercar course in Australia. If you want to see a really well-organised machine at work, do what I did and pay $499 for nine laps (or buy four laps for $299).

"Our customers are from heartland Australia, so we work hard to try to keep the price down," Greg says. On 70 days a year, the boys put 15,000 men and women in the driver's seat of a highly modified V8. At Sandown, 250 of my closest friends got to drive with about 1000 of their besties looking on. Disneyland and the worlds (Sea, Dream, Adventure, Movie, Ocean, Wally) could learn a lot from the V8 Race set-up.

When you buy your pass, you're given a time. Fifteen minutes beforehand there is a drivers' briefing for about 30 people. You transfer to the racing-suit department, then to the have-your-photo-taken department (even if you don't want one), then to the sitting-waiting-for-your-car-of-choice (Holden, Ford, automatic) department. Here you are given a hairnet and a helmet. You keep moving along a set of chairs until your car arrives. You are buckled in, shown where the clutch and loud pedal are, introduced to your instructors (one of 120) and off you go.

The instructors want you to go fast: the course has more marker cones than your local ice-cream shop and the brakes work most of the time. When you come out of the car, you pass back through the racing-suit department to the pick-up-your-photo-and-other-related-merchandise department, then go and have a very good sausage sandwich and cappuccino. What a gift for the special petrolhead in your life.

Correction to September 7 column: Because I've wanted to write about his Javelin for two years, I accused Jim Richards of driving his 1972 AMC in this year's Masters. He is now driving a less quaint Falcon Sprint.

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