OVER & OUT

IN BETWEEN ALL THE SERIOUS TESTING AND FAST DRIVING WAS QUITE A BIT OF INCONVENIENT TRUTH, AND STUPIDITY

- DAVID MORLEY

NEVER GIVE a bunch of journos, photographers and videographers a two-way radio. It only brings out the even-worse in them. Dad jokes, live fart transmissions, dodgy celebrity impersonations, you name it. In fact, every form of lame humour from puns right up to ‘Houston, we have a fly on the lens’. Laugh? I nearly started…

But here’s where PCOTY is different. The moment we started our hill-climb loop, the radio chatter just stopped. Dead. No more. Radio silence. After the constant, crackly barrage of pre-pubescent nonsense, this was almost like a temporary armistice to bury the dead jokes and cart the wounded gags back to the trenches.

It’s not that the MOTOR army had suddenly discovered the awful truth about man-boob jokes or that the anti-pun lobby had intervened with firearms. Instead, the reality of the cars we were now punting up and down a sinuous piece of hotmix laid up a hill almost steep enough to be called an escarpment had dawned. And we weren’t going to miss a millisecond of it for all the crap jokes in all the Christmas bon-bons ever made.

And so it began; a remarkable, wonderful afternoon of punching this year’s pick of the crop across several kliks of swishing corners and enough elevation to test Newton-metres going up and brakes coming down.