buckle-up

  Among the posts to this blog, Buckle-Up, from which I drew inspiration for the HPDE articles published in NASA Speed News was the post of April 21, 2010. It was titled, A father’s advice … where I noted how even as my father resided in Australia, we would always talk after a weekend at the track. This we had done since that first outing back in 2008.   While there are many instances of father’s providing good advice to their offspring – Indy and F1 are liberally littered with second and even third generation racers – on the occasion of this post I referenced racer Sebastian Saavedra’s father who gave his son advice that resonates with me to this day.   \“Sebastian understands well what I always taught him; if you don’t have a first place car, don’t drive it like one! Drive the car you have, finish the race, and take the points!” While these remarks were expressed when we watched a round of the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) that was held in Long Beach, just down th...

  As Sunday night crept over the golf course alongside our home, the falling snow finally abated. On more than one occasion I had stepped outside to first clean snow off the roof of our ragtop Range Rover Evoque as concern mounted that two plus feet of snow might be too much to bear. It was then a case of knocking down the “flow of snow” building up on the entrance to our front door. By “flow of snow” I meant that; the more snow that fell the more the snow began forming what looks like a small waterfall. All around us trees were sagging under the weight and close in to Ft Collins the big cottonwood trees began losing branches onto homes, cars and the sidewalks. Photos soon appeared of snowplows stuck in drifts along with news that the main interstate highway, I25 was closed just north of us all the way to the Wyoming border.   As the news updates late last week informed us all to hunker down for a storm of historic performance, we elected to drive to Ft Collins for a Friday ...

  With the second post written for the National Auto Sports Association (NASA) digital publication, Speed News, I upped the ante somewhat. While the central theme was about going fast and having fun, little did either Margo or I realize the commitment this would require! To be honest, for most of that first year on track with NASA as a participant in their High Performance Driver Event (HPDE) program it was more a case of hanging on and hoping to be able to drive home with the car we brought. This second post also made reference to a previous post that appeared on this blog. It was a reference to an outing in a Ferrari F430 that good friend David Roberts had arranged for me and my good friend Brian Kenny while we were visiting him in Sydney. The venue was Sydney Motor Sport Park and with a number of weekends completed with NASA there was still no denying that a huge gulf in skill existed between a pro driver and those like Margo and I wanting to simply drive our car fast. For t...

  OK, so let’s talk cars! After all, this Buckle-Up blog has always been about motor vehicles, road trips, car shows and our time out on track. I know, it’s been a while to dedicate a post just to cars but for Margo and me year 2020 represents a milestone. That’s right; we didn’t buy a single car all year! Mark that down as a new record for Margo and me although truth be known (and already recorded in earlier posts), we did order a new car for delivery sometime in 2022. Does that even count? Worth noting, however, was how we took the time in 2019 to reduce the number of cars from six – plus an RV and trailer – to four and this year that number will be further reduced to just three. Count them; a garage with only three cars to choose from. I seriously don’t know if I will be able to adjust to this new reality! For the past two decades, we have really had opportunities to pretty much test drive many different cars.   Some we truly did enjoy more than others even as we had ac...

As I said in the previous post, there will be one additional post published each month in this blog that are re-postings of articles I wrote for the National Auto Sports Association (NASA) digital publication, Speed News. These posts cover outings in High Performance Driving Events (HPDE) over the course of almost a decade. Having been asked how to access these articles and realizing the magazine was a NASA members-only benefit, I have elected to publish them all here in order for there to be a more reader-friendly way to check them out. If you have ever had thoughts about taking the family car onto a race track to circulate for lap after lap with like-minded enthusiasts, then it’s very clear that you have to start somewhere. The value proposition that came from joining NASA is that they provided instructors along with a ladder up which you could progress until you reached a point where you could choose a race group to join. Or not! Readers may recall that I started posting about the...

  This post, which I suspect will be a little shorter than what you normally come across in this blog, could have easily been written as a series of comments to other posts already published. However, it turns out that there is a common theme even if you have to look hard to find it. We have just dodged another snowfall – somehow it’s taking place well to the south of us – but it is mid-January and we have weathered seven snowfalls so it seems as though we should be preparing for the worst to happen deeper into 2021. The picture above may have appeared in previous posts, but I am not sure. Its inclusion here is for no other reason than I wanted something that depicted changes and this kind of fits the bill. Taken less than two years ago, we no longer have anything depicted here; not even the trailer in the background or the garage itself. But then again, spending as much time at home as we have now done, we keep wondering if we should have held on to the RV. And what about the mo...

  While it would be so easy to launch into an examination of all the poorly executed recent initiatives that are mostly reactive to decisions being made outside of China, there is one program that for Margo and me stands head and shoulders above all others. Believe it or not, China is restricting its import of Australian wines and indeed penalizing the Australian wine producers. After years of investment in the China marketplace, often times at the expense of catering to other markets, China has now snubbed one of Australia’s best industries putting in place a trade embargo. Many of Australia’s wines are world class have been caught up in this action with perhaps none more highly regarded globally than Penfolds. China may have something to do with fireworks as I recall, as they invented the firecracker but even so, they cannot put on a show to match that of Sydney when it’s time to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Once again, China Pandemic not withstanding – and yes, I have to admit, I...