I took the Disco out for its first off-road test on Saturday with a couple of mates. Keen readers (who care) would probably be asking right now (if they existed) if the brakes were fixed. Well they were, but not through any action of mine. It rained at some point, and it was too cold the rest of the time to be outside removing wheels. So, no, I never bothered to bleed the brakes. Instead I just drove it around like normal and, wierdly, they came good by themselves. So here's a tip: If you do drive a 2 tonne four-wheel-drive and the brakes feel really vague and well, dangerous, just continue driving as normal - two weeks of daily driving later, they'll be good as gold.

Back to the story, the whole day was pretty uneventful, which in a roundabout way is an event itself. Nothing broke, I didn't pop the bonnet once. I even dragged someone up a hill after they smashed their transfer box in their Hilux. I've hardly ever been on that end of a snatch strap before. The Disco still has bog standard road tyres on it, but it mostly didn't have any trouble except for one brief section where I had to drive up out of a creek via some muddy track which was slippery as hell.

The only real exciting bit happened later on while climbing a steep gravel hill, about half way up one of the rear wheels slipped down into a wash-out, cocking the opposite (front) wheel into the air. The next thing all I could see was the blue sky. It's a kinda disturbing feeling being in a 4WD when suddenly the ground disappears in front of you and there's the physical sensation of the vehicle heading towards the more obtuse end of a protractor but without any visual cues as to when its going to stop. (Thankfully, the interior of the Disco is already brown, clearly they've thought this through.) My reaction was to get straight off the gas and straight on the brake pedal, which by this stage was feeling even better. (Another tip if you have dodgy brakes, get yourself into a situation where dodgy brakes could be even more dangerous than normal, that seems to fix them.) Getting out of that was easy enough though, I just had to roll backwards slowly, though I had someone direct me as I still had no bearings as to where the ground was or wasn't.

At the end of the day I was quite impressed by the Disco off-road. I mean obviously Land Rovers are built for this sort of thing, but I never really bought it solely for that purpose (I'll get to the real reason later). The day itself was pretty boring, as it was mostly other people getting caught or breaking things. That part of the day isn't quite the same when it isn't your car. In fact it's quite annoying, to be honest, I have no idea why I ever got invited places in the Pajero.

So that was Saturday, afterwards I went to a 4th of July party hosted by the American girl from work. The party had started about 4 hours before I got there, and there wasn't much happening except for sparklers, a few American beers and a lively discussion about everything that was wrong with Terminator: Salvation, starting with the fact it was even made.

Sunday I had planned on doing some work on the R32 to prepare it for drifting on the coming Wednesday. It was too cold in the morning for anything like that so I swung by the parents place instead, they had just returned from somewhere (no idea where), but I was mostly there to collect mail and for the free feed. I got a bit held up trying to ghetto engineer something on one of their caravans, so by the time I got home I had a valid excuse not to do anything to the R32.

I managed to pick up the vital fluids I needed on the way home, but I didn't touch the car until Wednesday afternoon at 3:45pm (as in when I was leaving for the drift event). As expected every fluid was down, except fuel, but its place was taken by the lack of air in the tyres. Running with the theme, a turn of the key revealed that the battery voltage had also joined the the game of inconvenience limbo. Great.

I dragged the Skyline out of the garage after an attempt at a jump start with a spare battery had failed, and fetched the Disco. Eventually the R32 spluttered into life. At this stage I gave up worrying about fluids and made a dash to the drift track, which is thankfully just down the road. I made a brief pit-stop in what I can presume to be the only servo in Brisbane that doesn't sell air, and a couple of minutes later rolled up at the front gate. Matt had paid for me, so I just squiggled my name and headed inside to find a park, and threw in a couple of litres of fluids. With that done and a quick chat with Matt which went along the lines of "Fuck my car, fuck my tyres, fuck my life" and I joined the queue.

I've never been on this track before, though I had watched a session before. It's actually a go-kart track, so its ridiculously tight in places. If you spin you'll end up Austin Powers-ing, rather than the preferable and far more stylish burnout. I can't drift for shit, so my technique involved a Scandanavian flick combined with a big lift off into the first corner, which worked roughly half the time. Lifting off the throttle meant I lost all boost though, and for some reason I wasn't making any until 5 grand. So I'd bog down mid corner, make boost at the exit, get all crossed up and flick back the other way through the small chicane.

Through the esses was anyones guess, but it generally involved the doing same as the first corner, unless I was still tank slapping from the chicane. I actually nailed that kind of entry a few times but then lost all my speed and boost by the time I got to the second part of the S and bogged down. It was all pretty frustrating, and even clutch kicking wasn't helping the back end step out at all. All I seemed to get was under-steer. I have no idea how to drift, clearly.

Some drift master came up to my window while I was queued and offered the advice to just ignore the first corner, after the following lap I did decide to ignore it. The advice that is, not the corner. To me it was the only corner that actually had any room to set the car up properly to slide, at least the way I slide. Which is awkwardly, at best, and accidentally more often than not.

By the time it had gotten dark, I hadn't managed to achieve much, although I had avoided all the tyres so far. I was getting a bit frustrated and more limiter-friendly, and by this stage Matt had given up and picked up his camera. I had a big spin through the esses but kept the gas on, and made it into a donut just like I had planned it that way (heres one I prepared earlier), in turn generating probably the only decent amount of tyre smoke I had all night.

I was probably getting worse as the night went on, but getting more aggressive as well. Eventually, it caught up to me and with a big tank-slapper I ran the R32 up a smallish embankment that Matt had been standing behind the lap previous. With a big crunch the car stopped and the front bar flew off and landed near the fence. The engine was still running but there was a horrible noise coming from the engine bay and coolant was hissing, I turned the car off and got out and expected to have a camera right in my face, but Matt had disappeared over to the other side of the track, presumably for safety reasons.

A crowd appeared and helped drag it backwards, it wasn't wedged so it was fairly straight forward to wheel it back to the fence where Matt was parked. The crowd kindly pushed it into a reverse park while I steered. I got out and surveyed the damage. It actually didn't look as bad as it felt. The intercooler had punched a hole through the radiators, but none of the chassis rails appeared to be damaged. The bottom radiator crossmember was still straight and the engine itself hadn't suffered any damage. The noise was caused by the clutch fan just hitting the radiator.

The bonnet wouldn't close completely, but this may have been related to the popping mechanism which presumably copped part of the impact from the intercooler, rather than any body panels being out of alignment. All the coolant had drained immediately and the radiator itself was obviously not salvageable. Surprisingly though, the intercooler and piping still hold air, which they hardly ever did even before being hit so violently. And this was despite having a couple of the pipes crushed like Coke cans. The car running though, made moving it a lot easier.

After chatting to a bunch of randoms for the best part of half-an-hour about stupid things they've hit drifting, I caught a lift back to my place to get the Disco (see, now it makes sense). I had to do a bit of driving around to find a car trailer, but soon I was back at the drift track. I drove the R32 to the front gate and got out to open it. Immediately a fight broke out behind me. Not my fault presumably, unless the closed gate was keeping the two boofheads apart. Box copped some collateral damage in the jaw from a wayward left hook, which is terribly unlucky. There wasn't even a pool table involved.

Once the crowd had cleared (by me having driven through it) I put the R32 out on the street and then organised the ramps on the trailer. Almost immediately as I got back in the R32, red and blues appeared. There was something familiar about this. I quickly spun the car around and straight up onto the trailer.

Over came the wallopers to ask what was going on, and low and behold, it was the very same police woman who had pulled me over in my driveway. Clearly touched by this moment, she decided to instead focus on the crime that had taken place that evening, and left us to sort the trailer out.

After that I headed back home and threw the R32 back in the garage (where it will probably stay for a while), and returned the trailer. My reversing of the trailer into its parking spot back at the servo was by far the best driving I had done all night, its just a shame nobody was there with a camera. That shit was geometrically perfect. First go, too. Clearly, I'm in the wrong game.

dug this post

you could have worked a great (though terrible) pun into that with a bit more effort

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