This one’s rare. Firstly, the number of cars that have been produced in the last fifty or so years that can be traced back to the creative efforts of one individual are uncommon indeed. (Well, successful cars, anyway!). Secondly, while there has been a handful of individuals that have achieved automotive success in this way, very few biographies have been written about them.

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I don’t claim to be well versed in race car driving, although I’ve driven a production race car for a few laps of a circuit and I’ve driven road cars on skidpans and race tracks and at manufacturers’ proving grounds.

Conversely, I have driven probably about half a million kilometres on roads. Like you probably also have, I’ve driven on smooth freeways, on rutted dirt, on gravel and patched bitumen, and roads with corners and roads with straights. Roads with hills; roads that are flat. Roads with lots of traffic; roads with none. Roads that are easy; roads that throw corners and dips at you with startling, frightening suddenness.

And I know that the most common attribute of roads is their inconsistency. Not only do roads suddenly change as you progress along them, but the same road can have an utterly different character if the weather or traffic change.

The times that I have been on racetracks have shown me one thing: their variability is simply vastly less than roads. Yes, there can be changes in weather and traffic, but you don’t usually need to be wary of cars coming the other way, cars that might cross the centreline, for example. You don’t need to wonder where the next corner goes and – after one lap – you don’t need to worry if the surface has deteriorated overnight, or an errant truck has sprinkled gravel or diesel across your path.

And roads have bumps, lots of bumps. You need only watch racing cars on street circuits to see how smooth the tracks they drive on usually are. Even the groomed-for-racing street circuit looks bumpy when being traversed by racing cars; a road car barely notices.

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In the last week I have been lucky enough to see in close-up detail two unique cars, both of which are made largely from scratch.

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It’s along time since I worked behind the counter in a shop – and even then it was only a Christmas job. So maybe I’ve forgotten what complete idiots many customers are and how store staff have to cope with that day-in and day-out. But jeez I find it frustrating buying stuff.

Invariably, when you buy an automotive component, the first thing the staff ask you is: “What make and model?”

They’ll ask that even if you have brought in a sample – say a piece of bent wire for a custom-shaped water hose on a turbo conversion. It doesn’t matter if you say: “It’s a custom job; do you have one like this?” …they just repeat the question.

Today I wanted to buy some oil that’s used in the steering dampers of motorcycles. I wanted to know:

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When the latest Evo model Mitsubishi Lancer came out I looked with interest at the rear fins stuck all over the trailing edge of the roof.

Mitsubishi calls them vortex generators, a term I was already familiar with from aircraft. Some aircraft use vortex generators placed on the upper surface of the wings to delay flow separation and so reduce the speed at which wing stall occurs. But the Mitsubishi isn’t an aircraft flying along, so what do they do on that car? A tech paper from Mitsubishi soon revealed that they improve the flow of air down the rear glass, so getting more air to the wing and probably also reducing the size of the wake.

I was inspired enough by the design to make a bunch of my own (using the alternative shape shown in the tech paper) and stick them over the trailing edge of the roof of my NHW10 Prius. However, on-road testing showed that the reduction in drag (for that was what I was after) wasn’t enough to make a dramatic difference to fuel economy, as I had already achieved with my frontal undertray.

So I put the idea to one side, perhaps for later revisiting with different shaped vortex generators or another car.

But when I came across a discussion group post that talked about an Australian company selling vortex generators with the aim of reducing fuel consumption, my interest was again aroused. The company, VG Fuelsavers, had recently featured on local TV as an invention worth watching. The website http://www.fuelsavers.com.au showed some pics of the vortex generators, which are made of sheet aluminium and look much more like aircraft designs than the shape of the ones used on the Evo Lancer. A kit of nine vortex generators with fitting instructions, cleaning wipes, double sided tape and a template cost AUD$110, including delivery. Which seems fine by me.

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For once this column doesn’t talk much about cars. But the process I went through was eerily similar to sorting the wheat from the chaff that occupies much of my time when testing new cars…

My elderly father had decided he wanted some new stereo speakers. None of this new-fangled home 6-speaker theatre nonsense; what he wanted was a pair of speakers capable of reproducing the full normal listening spectrum – say from 40 – 20,000Hz. Of course, at 84, he wasn’t going to be hearing too many 20,000Hz notes (and nor would I be!), but he wanted to replace the near 30-year-old 10 inch 3-ways that had been serving duty in the lounge room all that time.

His knowledge may be out of date but it’s certainly not lacking in depth: over the very long time that he’s been interested in sound engineering he’s built amplifiers and speakers and has followed the transition from 78s, to 33s, from mono to stereo and thence to CD and DVD. So when I was invited along to participate in the listening tests, I was very much conscious of being a background adviser, rather than any kind of dictator of outcome.

When he’d broached the subject of speakers, I’d reflected over the web discussions I’d been browsing, over the newspaper and magazine accounts of speakers I’d casually read, and thought that a pair of speakers produced by an Australian manufacturer would provide the best value for money. I don’t think any Australian company manufactures loudspeaker drivers per se (Etone excepted), but while many denigrate the companies producing speaker systems as mere ‘box-stuffers’, the matching of woofers, midranges and tweeters to each other and an enclosure is as much an art as a science. And if the locals can get it right, the saving represented by Australian assembly (and so the lack of need to transport bulky and heavy furniture items internationally) is considerable.

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You’ll have to indulge me, to pander to my obsession. A few months ago I wrote about my newly purchased Greenspeed pedal trike (see Driving Emotion ) and in the time since, I been both pedalling it a lot – and modifying it. True, the modifications aren’t fundamental, but they’ve added to the riding enjoyment.

But first, if you haven’t read that previous column, what’s this about a trike? The Greenspeeds are recumbent machines, ones where you lie back at a steep angle on a hammock-like seat. The pedals are way out front and the trike uses two front steerable wheels and a single rear chain-driven wheel. My trike has 63 gears, front drum brakes and zero scrub radius steering.

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Right now I am typing with green fingers. Not ‘green’ as in the metaphorical fingers that gardeners have; nope, green as in covered in green paint. I am not quite sure why the paint is green; it could equally have been red or black or silver. But when I made the colour choice, green seemed more appropriate for a bandsaw and a table saw.

You see, I’ve been buying more machinery. I’ve now decided that good quality machinery in an amateur workshop will last forever, so if I buy it now, it’ll always be available for use. Even if that use is so intermittent that the machine gets a work-out only every six months. In fact, another machine I have just bought will probably fall into that occasional-use category. But I’ll come back to that one in a minute – what’s this about a bandsaw and table saw?

Both items had come up at the local Tender Centre. Tender Centres are an interesting way of buying secondhand bits and pieces. The goods are arranged for inspection, and – like at an auction – each item has a ‘lot’ number marked on it. However, unlike at an auction, when you make a bid (called a tender) you have no idea of the amounts that other people are bidding for the same items. This is because the tenders are submitted in writing.

The goods can only be inspected on certain days – usually a Friday, Saturday and Sunday once per fortnight. At the inspection, a clipboard is issued and you fill in your contact details on the form. Carrying the clipboard around with you, you then write down the ‘lot’ numbers of the items that you’re interested in, and state what you’re prepared to pay for them. Items may have a reserve – but you don’t know what it is.

That Sunday night you hear which of your tenders were successful. In addition to the tender amount, a small processing fee is paid per successful tender, and also paid is the equivalent of a buyer’s premium – around ten per cent.

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Back in November 2004 we drove the VZ Commodore SV6 (see Holden VZ SV6 Manual Test) and in January 2005 we tested the VZ Commodore wagon – see Holden Acclaim Wagon. Of course, the VZ is the last iteration of the Commodore that began life with the VT model in 1997, but powered by a pair of new high tech, quad cam, 3.6-litre engines rather than the old pushrod 3.8 litre V6. The quad cam had been an engine we were very much looking forward to and well before its launch, we trumpeted its design in Holden’s New World Class V6. However, as the two on-road tests show, the reality was far less impressive than the on-paper spec.

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