Top Christmas gift tips for petrolheads

TODAY, the Weekend A Plus petrolhead gift guide and chicken salad. These are not meant to be gifts for anyone else but you.

Top tips for petrolheads

I'M tired of Christmas already. Long lunches backed up by longer dinners, cards from people you have been trying to forget, crook presents from your suppliers, and even your secret back roads are full of happy caravaners, grey nomads and cars filled with bikes, surfboards, outboard motors and vomiting children, and drivers who think the speed limit is something you take notice of.

So today, as promised, the Weekend A Plus Motoring section petrolhead gift guide and chicken salad. These are not meant to be gifts for anyone else but you. As motoring editor Phil King is always telling me, "There is no I in loser."

OK. The copywriters at the Australian Wine Club call it the Ford Falcon of reds, which shows they don't know much about cars. The RedHeads Red Sedan cabernet blend 2012 is the Toyota Camry of wine and only $21 a bottle. Who cares what it tastes like? It's from South Australia, but then so was Holden. Any winemaker that pays homage to metal maniacs deserves a free plug.

Who doesn't want to be Steve McQueen? (Except he's dead, but apart from that still the King of Cool.) Go to thekingofcool.com for the leather jacket, pictured, he wore in his greatest role, as Captain Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape. It's not the exact same jacket, that would be pretty woofy by now, but somewhat similar and it's under a grand. Just think, you can relive the moment when Bud Ekins stood in for Steve and tried to jump the barbed wire fence on a TT Special 650 Triumph (standing in for a BMW) as he attempted to escape Colonel Wilhelm Klink at Luftwaffe Stalag 13. Oh wait. Maybe that's another German camp.

Get real. You can't afford a Bugatti but you can afford a watch with a Bugatti type 57 Atlantic's speedo as its face, pictured left. The good folk at Bavarian Chrono have forgotten the war and are offering our readers one of these beauties for about $300. Go to chronowatchcompany.com.

Talking of old things, the clothing company Suixtil has a special edition shirt celebrating 100 years of something about Juan Manuel Fangio. Suxtil used to make Juan's clothes. For only about $180 you get the Captain Escuderia Suixtil label and the Balcarce short sleeves version in light yellow. No, not a clue what that means. Yours at suixtil.com.

Pirelli's supply of tyres to Formula One hasn't been the most successful of sponsorships, but for 50 years it has turned out calendars that money can't buy. If you or I took photos like this we would be called perverts, but in the Pirelli they are called art. pirellical.com/50years.

Car and Driver called it "a 415-hp (310kw) Real American Hero (via Australia)". We call it the 2014 Chevrolet SS or, the Commodore with the steering wheel on the wrong side and extra gear at a cheaper price. Fully specced, the SS sells for $48,000 in the US versus about $58,000 here. If they decide the very limited edition is a goer, GM will move production to the US. Motor Authority says "it deserves to be on the same stage not just with the likes of the Dodge Charger SRT8 and Chrysler 300 SRT8 but also perhaps with the Jaguar XFR, BMW 550i, and Infiniti M56". Forbes magazine named it seventh in its top 15 hottest cars. So here's your Christmas tip. Buy one.

Have a great holiday, a top new year and remember some of us have to work through. Not that we here at Motoring are complaining. Much.

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