I have survived the first two months as your President and would like to thank our committee for all the work they have done behind the scenes.

Many hours go into organising an event and we should all be grateful for this work done by our volunteers. I don’t really have a clue what goes on but fortunately you have a great secretary and past president that can point me in the right direction.

One of our past Presidents informed me that the President of a car club should have an old car. I thought if you had a love of cars that it would be enough. After 2½ years in the club I decided I should do something about it. I couldn’t spend much because I first had to build a shed to garage the car. I finally purchased a car that will be eligible for Club registration in February next year so I might get to find out how the system works.

I purchased a 2000 Mercedes Benz SLK350 convertible! First job was to get it serviced and find out how many faults it has. I also found that so far no one knows how to fix a couple of the things that eventually should be fixed. On top of that when I took it for a drive I found out that it Does NOT have a new car warranty, it hasn’t got a reversing camera, park assist, lane keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, lane change assist, a USB socket for your music and videos and you cannot take your hands off the steering wheel when you want to take the wrapper off your cough lolly!

But it is fun to drive, and I love to put the top down, but then I worry that if it rains the thing won’t go up again.

I really wanted a Jaguar XK120 convertible but did not have a spare 250k lying about.

How motoring has progressed over the last 75 years. The fastest production car in 1949 was the Jaguar XK120. It had a 3.4 litre 6-cylinder engine with twin overhead cams and hemispherical combustion chambers, something that the Yanks couldn’t get until the Hemi Pacer in the seventies. The Jag would do Zero to 100 kilometres an hour in 10.4 seconds and could reach a top speed of 120 miles an hour (About 197 KL per hour). My shopping trolley being the Volkswagen Polo has a one litre, 3-cylinder engine which can do zero to 100 kilometres an hour in 9.5 seconds and reach a top speed of 207 kilometres per hour. Somehow though the Jag still feels faster. If only the Jag wasn’t 6 times the price of the little VW.

Maybe I should stick to the new cars as I can’t fix either of them but at least the new car has a warranty so that someone else can fix them. Hats off to our members that have mechanical skills.

Some of you have probably noticed that I cannot spell, and my grammar is not the best. Fortunately, in my 46-year insurance career my clients were not much better. If you can’t find errors, it is probably because our editor is on the ball.

Brian Rainey