Tank Slap 3 The Tragic Van

Sometimes owning a clapped out pile of junk can be as fun as owning a brand spankers one, and certainly more exciting!  Particularly when a new and violent wobble develops while you are gunning up the freeway.

This is the story of an '81 Ford Transit I bought…well, not quite bought…ahh, I'll start at the start.

I used to rally a '77 LB Lancer in the Group 7 Rally series.  It was an enormous amount of fun, but quite a logistical nightmare, as you need to carry or organise a heap of tools, spare parts, a bunch of mates that are willing to sit in a cold and usually wet forest in the middle of the night pretending to be Service Crew, a Navigator (that usually starts as a best mate and finishes as a psychotic nemesis) and have something to tow the car with.  
Some teams drove their car to and from rallies, but as I had a habit of finishing one of every two rallies, I decided early on I needed to trailer the Lancer there and back.  These non-finishes were either from a mechanical fault, or a severe case of "Treeus Interruptus".  At the time my other car was a battered multicoloured Renault 16, which was obviously not suitable for towing anything, let alone a rally car on a car float (In fact it was better suited as a garden shed than actual transport).

As I was an engine reconditioner back then, I built a motor for a mate in my spare time, to help with the rally funding (the difference between owning a boat and owning a rally car is the hole in which you throw your money is dusty instead of wet.  Actually, it's often both dusty and wet…).  He then informed me, once I had finished building the motor, that he couldn't afford to pay me all of it.  He was a hundred bucks short, and very sorry, and would I like his Transit van instead?

I needed a tow car, and the van had six months of rego, so without seeing it, I said okay.  Anyone spot the mistake there?  The transit turned out to be worth roughly $100, including the rego.  It was red, black and yellow, with a mission-brown roof, all painted in house paint with a brush, and had more cancer than Yul Brenner.  It didn't have a straight through exhaust; it had a straight-off exhaust, apparently still somewhere on the F3 freeway in the Newcastle vicinity.  It did, however, have a strong 4.1 Falcon motor with a C4 auto.  Perfect for towing.

I drove the thing home to have a look at it.  There was a monstrous set of roof racks on it that looked like it was made from stolen railway sleepers, the dash was mostly missing and replaced with a piece of ply wood, and the back was done out in a tasteful array of chipboard bedding and beige shag pile.  It was promptly gutted and a bench seat fitted in the back.

The first event I used it on, it went through two tyres, the second event it blew the other two.  From then on we kept one spare tyre for the rally car, one spare for the trailer and five spares for the van.  The thing looked shocking, sort of Scooby-Doo meets Jed Clampett.  It ended up being brush painted white in a vain attempt at stopping hippies from waving at us or trying to buy baggies.  Unfortunately it just looked like the ice-cream van from hell.

I drove it to a rally in Bulahdelah, loaded with all the tools, spares and race gear, with four mates in it, the Lancer on the car trailer, seven tyres and two jerry cans of fuel on the roof racks.  It must have looked a sight, because as we passed through the road works back when they were widening the highway north of Karuah, the team of road workers pointed at us and all fell about laughing.  I kind of took offence at that, and positioned the van so that the trailer tyres (which stuck out a half a foot wider than the van) would clip the nice neat long row of witches' hats, sending them flying.

The road crew didn't see the humor and started chasing us on foot, but luckily for us, the traffic was beginning to pick up above walking pace.  I moved the van into the middle of the lane again as we were all laughing hard, but I could still hear a regular thumping noise.  I looked over, and Trevor (well, I'll call him Trevor to protect the guilty, mainly because I don't actually know anyone called Trevor), had opened the passenger door of the Transit, and was swinging it in and out in order to belt all the witches hats with it!

On the way back, yet another tyre blew, this time the passenger rear, shredding a foot long length of tread which flapped along the inner guard like a mower blade.  It caught some rust and rolled up a neat strip of metal like a sardine lid all the way from the front to the back of the inner guard.  The noise was horrendous.  It must've been even worse for Trevor, as he was fast asleep with his ear on the wheel arch when it blew!  I blame Karma.

We all drove down to Bathurst to service for another friend running an LA Lancer rally car, while mine was off the road from an electrical fault (I put a tree through the alternator), but unfortunately it was mid winter.  It was so cold there was snow in the main street of Bathurst!  Guess what else didn't work on the Transit.  You guessed it, no heater.  To make matters worse due to the cancer in the floor, it was draftier than a very fat Scotsman in a very short kilt.  It was so cold, two of the crew boycotted it in favor of another crew's four wheel drive (with heater).  The other three were torn between growing nasal stalagmites, or being seen in a Lada Niva.  They opted for the "Snotsicles".  About 40 minutes out of Bathurst, with the outside temperature wedged firmly in "Arctic", and the temperature in the van not being much different, the dashboard began to smoke.  This wasn't unusual, and a quick shake of the radio in the plywood dash would generally stop it from having a meltdown.  It didn't work this time, and strangely enough the roof seemed to have more smoke around it than the dash did.  

I looked back to find my two mates had lit a small camp fire on the metal floor of the Transit from old chip packets and a Trading Post, in order to keep warm.  I probably wouldn't have minded so much if it wasn't for the fact we were doing 90 in an 80 zone in sleet, with the outside of the windows fogging up, and the inside smoking out.  Actually, I think what pissed me off was I was still cold and they were warming up! Bastards.

In an event at Oberon, the Lancer's fuel pump had packed it in halfway through the event, a few k's after a triple caution jump.  A Caution means be aware of something possibly dangerous, a Double Caution means slow down or you'll get helmet shaped speed humps in the roof, and a Triple Caution means you have probably driven onto a Motorcross track.  Marty, my navigator and I knew what the cautions meant, but the service crew coming in to find us didn't.  Your hearing gets pretty good in the dead of night, particularly when you are waiting for the last car through, so we heard the sound of a large bore engine working hard, hammering through the forest, accompanied by the clatter of flying rocks, even when it was some distance away.  It wasn't the V8 Commodore sweep car that we heard approaching, it was my bloody Transit van, loaded with all the tyres, tools and the four Trevors.  The first thing that the Trevor driving asked, was "What's the sign with the three exclamation marks mean?".  Uh oh.  They showed me the dents in the roof from where my tradesman's four drawer toolbox had hit it from the inside.

All up, the van did 40,000k's in the 2 years I owned it, and another 60,000k's in the hands of a mate that drove it most of the way around Godzone.  It never got one oil change in all that time.  Yep, sometimes it's fun to drive an old dunger.  I couldn't imagine standing on the roof of a 200SX in order to check out the surf, that's for sure.