Left the hotel around 7:30am. By 1:30pm, I'd already put in two laps around Mount Panorama outside of Bathurst.

Good times... good times.

Add to the mix a series of narrowish maze-like streets with odd camber changes and hundreds of stobie poles (it's an above-ground power neighborhood - not much demand to put it underground when the infrastructure is effectively car-proof), and accidents involving stobie poles aren't particularly uncommon, although this is a particularly nasty example.

Knowing that neighborhood, my money is on the driver being somewhere under 25, with white leather shoes and huge sunglasses, probably with an unfeasibly ornately trimmed beard. And a *massive* sense of entitlement and overconfidence. Needless to say, the car will have been bought with Dad's money.

Yeah, it's a stereotype. But one I've seen time and time again in that neighborhood.

Went back one evening with a mate to check it out, and discovered a $750 price tag. His diagnosis? Piece of junk, and suspiciously cheap at twice the price. Sure, it wasn't great looking - there was rust, but nothing that looked like it was eating into the sills or anything else that was *too* structural. But although Ford never sold the European Grenada in Australia, I'd seen enough of The Sweeney, The Professionals, Minder and other British TV growing up to know that this wasn't a good car - this was an AWESOME car.

Reversed flat black steelies with chrome dog-dishes and trim rings gave it a much wider track than it was ever designed for, putting the tyres almost flush with the body, and despite the faint smell of mildew coming from inside the car, I decided that it must be mine once I caught sight of the taillights. The Mk1 Grenada resembles nothing as much as a steroidal Cortina with the coke-bottle hips ironed out and the tail from a '67 Cougar grafted into place.

The first sign of trouble came when I went to buy it. It'd been sitting there for so long, unrecognised, unloved and undriven that the battery was completely flat and a donor unit had to be swapped out from another car before I could take a test drive. The steering wheel came from a mid-eighties Falcon, and the previous owner hadn't bothered to even attach it straight (it was on at about a 15 degree angle - far too crooked for it to be due to an alignment problem alone). The smell of rotting carpet was annoying, there was no radio, the motor was running without an aircleaner, and the speedometer cable had been broken since before it hit the lot.

But who cared? It had IRS (bear in mind that the Australian market Falcon didn't get IRS even as an option until late 1991!), four wheel discs and a glaspack muffler! Although it didn't have the Essex V6, that was blessing in disguise, as it'd been replaced with a hot 2.0L four with a four barrel carb and a four speed stick shift from (what I was assured) was a wrecked RS2000 Escort, for which parts are still common even today. I took that bit with a pinch of salt, but even if it wasn't accurate, the motor sure as hell wasn't running in stock trim.

Quickly scrounged a period-appropriate thin rimmed hard brown lacquer steering wheel from a '74 XB Falcon to replace the sun-deteriorated black foam rubber tiller, and discovered that prying the metal rear housing from the rectangular headlight of a '76 XC would save me from having to send off to Europe just to replace a deadlight.

But as with most things like this, the Grenada and I parted company all too soon. I was rear-ended at a red light by three teenage girl's in Mom's Mazda 121 Metro one afternoon, and although the car was still mechanically fine, they'd done a real number on the right taillight. And as a cash-strapped uni student, I was in no position to start in on bodywork and international parts-sourcing. I swapped the Grenada for a Valiant with a guy from my neighborhood who was completely mad for cramming V8s into UK Fords.

I wound up with a metallic teal CL Regal with cream bench seats that turned out to be a complete dog, even with its a 265ci hemi six and magnum rims, and the last I heard of the Grenada it'd been run into a tree and totalled, but only after being shoe-horned with a 351ci Cleveland.

And years later, some of the same friends who'd argued that the Grenada was the dumbest thing I'd ever bought allowed that, in retrospect, it was kind of a cool car, now that they'd seen 'Life On Mars'.

I haven't changed my licence over yet basically because the QLD driver's licence looks like a nasty cheap-ass library card. The sort of thing you could throw together in five minutes with a craft knife and a laminator.

Change the steering wheel back to something normal and remove the scrolling LED bar, and it resembles an updated KITT a lot less than an updated version of the ol' black-on-black XB Pursuit Special from Mad Max.

The plastics aren't world-class, and the seating position is a little higher than I might ideally like, but it hangs onto the road like glue through the Adelaide hills and is remarkably torquey all through the band. Great fun, and although it's nowhere are powerful as a Mazdaspeed3 or a WRX, it's narrow and short enough to throw, original-Mini-like, into corners on narrow roads that terrify my WRX driving friends.

An extra 35 ponies wouldn't hurt in the slightest. Too bad we probably won't see the factory-backed upgrade down here - we only just got ahold of the models with the 2.0 mill in June last year.