Great news, Australia!
Forget the VFL grand final, our golds at the Olympics and the much more interesting Paralympics, our wins against strong international competition in the three-legged race (excuse a pun of sorts), the frisbee competition and the Ms Maslin Beach contest at South Australia’s Maslin Beach Nudo Lympics. The Sultan was the only male entrant in the Mr or Other Maslin Beach comp but failed to place.
Yes, 20 readers and three readers of the exclusive newsletter, it’s back!
The Chiko Roll is back on the Mountain.
The Chiko Roll company will sponsor Betty Klimenko’s Erebus Motorsport Camaro with Brodie Kostecki, 26, of Perth and Todd Hazelwood, 29, of Adelaide. (And it’s happy birthday from us, Todd.)
In an exclusive interview via the Chiko website, Mr Ms Other Chiko told me the Chiko Roll was developed by Frank McEncroe, a boilermaker from Bendigo, Victoria. In 1950, Frank saw a competitor selling Chinese-style chop suey rolls outside the Richmond Cricket Ground and saw an opportunity.
Frank felt that the competitor rolls were too flimsy to be handled in an informal outdoor setting, so brought to life the idea of a much larger and more robust roll that would provide a quick meal fix, easily held in one hand, with a cool beer in the other.
By 1965, most Australian takeaway restaurants, milk bars and fish and chip shops stocked Chiko Rolls, with the marketing slogan “Grab a Chiko”. Sometimes sauce was added before it slid it into its own trademarked Chiko Roll bag.
At the height of their popularity in the 1970s, 40 million Chiko Rolls were being sold Australia-wide each year and more than a million were exported to Japan, which explains why its (Japan’s not Chiko’s) economic miracle stopped.
Of course, Bathurst, NSW, is the global HQ of the Chiko Roll. As Todd says: “Bathurst isn’t just home to the great race, it’s also home to the Chiko Roll. To see Chiko return to the Mountain feels like a homecoming for both the brand and the fans. Brodie and I are honoured to carry such a legendary part of Aussie culture into this year’s race, and we’re ready to give it everything we’ve got.” Ahh. Gives you a tear attack just hearing Chiko and Bathurst together, doesn’t it?
Plenty of tear attacks in Singers last weekend. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem, he of the jewellery ban, who posted that “like women who think they are smarter than men, for they are not in truth”, who has yet to investigate an official complaint about inappropriate behaviour by Christian Horner lodged by three women, who said he would never impose his beliefs on other people in disagreement with Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton standing up for their beliefs, and posted proud pics of himself with outstanding citizens like Prince Andy and Max Mosley, now wants to ban rude words from the sport because he doesn’t want drivers sounding like rappers (ie, black persons like Hamo).
The FIA ordered Max to complete a day of community service. By the way, the naughty words are bleeped when they go to air. Of course, in no other televised sport do you see players mouth the F word.
Then there was McLaren-gate. Right now, Mad Max leads the driver’s championship with 331 points. Leaping Lando is on 279. In the constructor’s championship McLaren are on 516, Red Bull (A team) is on 475 and Feezer on 441. So, Max can still win the championship. And it’s not just about getting podiums. The driver that sets the fastest lap (often the winner) gets a bonus point. The Red Bull B team brought Daniel Ricciardo in near the end of the race, gave him some soft tyres and said go out and do the fastest lap. Which he did for the 17th time. This meant the race winner Lando Norris didn’t get a point closer to Maxie.
It also meant Lando missed out on the Grand Slam or Grand Chelem.
That’s when a driver scores pole position, the fastest lap and then wins while leading every lap of the race on the same weekend. But wait, there’s more! There’s an episode of Suits coming after the US Department of Justice stuck it to F1 over its refusal to allow the Andretti-Cadillac team into the sport and the DOJ alleging that Red Bull’s B team sponsor, Visa is a “monopolist in the debit transaction markets”.
By the way Lando Norris won, with Mad Max second and our own Oscar third.
Look we don’t want to worry you, but if you want to know if your car is a lemon or is going to kill, you don’t expect the government to tell you. Nup, The Department of ITRDC and A in the people’s paradise of Canberra is too busy being the Acting Administrator of the Indian Ocean Territories, the Special Magistrate of the Jervis Bay Territory and promoting participation in, and access to, Australia’s arts and culture to tell you that the US has recalled more than 1.2 million Ram pick-up trucks, 32,863 Jeep Gladiators, more than 332,000 Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Jeeps and on Friday recalled 15,835 Fiats “due to a software error that may cause the front airbags to deploy with excessive force in a crash”.
Of course, all these brands are owned by the one company, Stellantis. In fact, things are so crook that chief executive Carlos Tavares is said to be getting the flick. That’s cold comfort to readers Helen and Jerry Chaberka who bought a pre-owned Jeep Grand Cherokee Trail Hawk MY20 in March 2022 from Berwick Jeep, Berwick’s trusted Jeep dealers, at 257 Princes Highway, Hallam, Victoria. As you know, Helsie and Jezza couldn’t get any response from Jeep, Stellantis or Berwick about their problems.
So, we have reached out to the good people at the ACCC, the Minister for The Department of ITRDC and A, Catherine King, who has just been off celebrating World Maritime Day and the Stellantis chair Johnny Elkann to ask if Carlos is getting the flick because of the way he treated Helsie and Jezza.
Finally, our car of the week is the Spanish Ferrari, 1954 Pegaso Z-102 Saoutchik Berlinetta being sold by our mate Phil Metcalf at Hyman Ltd in St Louis. Built in the former Hispano-Suiza factory in Barcelona, under the direction of superstar engineer Wifredo Medina, Pegaso featured advanced engineering including a high-performance twin-cam V8 engine with desmodromic valves (Nup, I don’t know) with the intention of challenging Ferrari on the world stage, and for a time, they succeeded – at one point, the Z-102 held the title of the world’s fastest production car. $1m drive away.
jc@jcp.com.au
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