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In late 2022 I attended the now-defunct Motorclassica show and lamented that it was essentially Cars and Coffee in a nice house with a more expensive than usual cars. None of the cars displayed told their stories, no interesting factoids were divulged, just the car as art. Now that works for a free Cars and…

The key to sand driving is tyre pressure, first and foremost. After that there’s a whole range of techniques, but if your pressures aren’t right, you’re going nowhere. Many people launch cars at Big Red, the largest dune in the Simpson Desert at speeds of up to 80km/h, because their tyre pressures are up around…

Just had a reader ask about a post from VicRoads saying that it only takes 15cm of water to float a small car. That seemed wrong to them, so I investigated and found the claim is misleading. The underlying message is about driving in floodwater, which is extremely hazardous and should never be risked. The…

I’ve reviewed Yankum’s Offset Ring and you can find the video at end of this post. Here I’m going to address clarifications and additions. Making a tech video is hard work and while I try and cover everything, sometimes I miss points or realise things could have been clearer. As I write this, over 4500…

There are plenty of videos about the Simpson Desert. If you want all the information you could ever need on the topic, refer to Stefan’s channel. If on the other hand you want to see what it’s really like, then watch this video I made. I’ll warn you now. Nothing interesting happens compared to what…

There is no perfect travel vehicle. Even if we take cost out of the picture entirely, you have a tradeoff between size/manouverability and interior space/comfort.  For example, you can buy a Ram 3500 and tow a 4000kg caravan…super comfortable, but that’s one huge rig so good luck going offroad with it, or even finding somewhere…

You hear it all the time – “…and he had a snap of oversteer…” or a “…big snap of oversteer….”, sometimes a “….BIIIIG snap of oversteer!” especially if you’re watching the excellent Karun Chandok or one of Jolyon Palmer’s brilliant dissections of matters on-track. As you watch the replay you’ll see the car wiggle, and…

An email landed in my inbox this morning proclaiming drive.com.au as ” Australia’s second-most-visited online automotive platform in February 2024.” That was interesting to me as I immediately wondered which the most popular “automotive platform” might be. Turns out, as per the title picture, it’s carsales.com.au. And, down in 6th place, is WhichCar, consisting I suspect…

There is no ‘best’ travel vehicle, and not even a ‘best’ campervan. It’s all a question of the tradeoffs you want to make. The diagram below is to scale and shows a Hilux, two Hiaces, a Sprinter and Fuso Canter, all of which can be converted into motorhomes. The Hiaces can be converted to 4WDs,…

We’ve always been taught that doubling a winch line back to the vehicle is a 2:1 mechanical advantage (MA), so if the force required to move the car is 1000kg then the winch need only generate 500kg. Similarly, for a 3:1 pull that same winch would only need generate 1/3 of the force required, or…