While backpacking around Australia a friend let me borrow his HT Holden while he was away working on a prawn trawler. Knowing that I was going to put a lot of kilometers on the car we gave it a very thorough once-over.

It was a hideous car. Joking I said “This should be a real Chick Magnet” and kept working. The next morning I found a neon yellow sticker with those very words stuck to the wind screen and had to promise the sticker would stay before I was given the keys.

I was heading south from the quiet inland city of Wagga Wagga down to Melbourne to visit friends, catch the F1 race and to start my journey up the East Coast. It was the first time for me driving a right-hand drive car as well as a column shift transmission.

Merging onto the empty highway, miles of open road lay before me. The radio was up, windows down and the sweet smell of eucalyptus heavy on the dry summer air. The drive was beautiful. Then I hit Melbourne rush-hour traffic.

On Friday.

Massive roundabouts appeared, with no clear indication of which road I needed to take. The traffic was getting heavier and I found myself downtown. I kept going left – I don’t know why, I didn’t have a chance to look at a map it just felt like the direction I needed to go.

Soon, there was an acrid smell in the air. It had to be coming from the lorry in front of me using its brakes quite heavily. The lorry turned off and the smell was still there – maybe it wasn’t him.

Replacing the lorry was a newish estate with a couple of cute girls in it looking back at me. I waved. They waved & smiled. The Chick Magnet was living up to its name; maybe this wasn’t too bad after all.

As we crept along the flirting continued. The terrible stench of brakes increased. The girls were laughing.

There was smoke.

It was rolling out from the passenger wheel arch and wafting across the hood. By this time the girls in the estate were pointing and laughing and I was looking for an escape route before the wheel caught fire. I eventually pulled into a petrol station and used their water hose to cool the brake assembly down. The girls were gone but disaster was averted. To this day I still don’t know if it was me or the impending fireball of a car that the girls were attracted to. My mate’s house that I was staying at was close by at this point and I was able to use some tools to rebuild the caliper.

The “Chick Magnet” was an awful car. I have estimated that I drove it close to 8,000 kilometers (don’t know for sure since all the gauges failed shortly after leaving Wagga) and over that distance I lost a wiper blade, blew a cylinder-head gasket, stripped three distributor gears, broke an engine mount, had to rebuild two brake calipers and blew a tire.