carsales Drive-Thru car chats with Greg Rust

Greg Rust is a dinky-di proper car guy. He’s lusted after them and raced them as a youngster and made a living talking about them on our television screens, and elsewhere, for much of his 50 years.

Rusty to his mates (and after one meeting it’s likely you’ll count him as one), Greg is passionate about many parts of the automotive spectrum and has an understated but almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the ins and out of Australian motorsport.

He’s also one of those rare media stars (a term he’d vigourously eschew, by the way) who knows it’s not about him. That’s why his podcast ‘Rusty’s Garage’ is so popular. Thrusta (yes, he’s got more than one nickname) has the unerring knack of getting his guest comfortable and the stories then flow.

But for once, the boot was on the other foot. And once we wound up the inner petrolhead, we couldn’t stop him...

“I was knee-high I reckon... Going with my parents to the Sydney Showground Speedway, and in later years, to Liverpool. My father is 80 and he’s as obsessed with motor racing now as he was back then, particularly speedway.

“But in terms of cars around the house... I have a younger brother and a younger sister and mum and dad took us on a family road trip all around western New South Wales when I was barely 10. We had a buttercup yellow 1979 Toyota Corona station wagon.

“Dad had a Charger, for a time, which I just loved and there was a couple of them in our street. We had sort of street gatherings and things like that – I can always remember that.”

“It was a TE Holden Gemini, which we bought locally. Back then there were no great things like carsales so you were going through newspapers, Trading Post and the like. And we found one locally, low kilometres, just a couple of blocks from where I grew up in Sydney, really.

“It was beige – it was terrible [colour]. But it was sound and I learnt an awful lot. The old man had to bail me out at one point and help me get a reconditioned engine because I was too rough with the engine that I had. I couldn’t afford Weber carburettors straight away so I can remember drilling holes in the airbox and putting in a Unifilter.

“I’ve got a good mate, a very close mate still, that’s an engineer now and we would always tinker, change clutches and the like. And the old man, thankfully, kind of steered me towards club level motorsport so I went halves with some schoolmates and bought a late 1970s Mitsubishi Galant with a worked 2.2-litre Sigma engine, five-speed Sigma box, twin side-draft 45mm Webers. We put a cage in it, mucked around with the suspension. It just became a club car, rally sprints and some circuit stuff.”

“We live on the North Island of New Zealand in Hawke’s Bay, so it’s kind of wine country. My wife grew up here and we relocated at the end of 2017. We’ve got a couple of acres and I’m no farmer but I needed a bit of a truck for different things, so I have a Nissan Navara ST-X dual cab. Sarah [Greg’s wife] has a Mercedes-Benz GLA 250 – something a bit nicer.

“[Racer] Greg Murphy, my neighbour, is a KTM ambassador and he surprised me for my birthday by organising the KTM New Zealand guys to loan me a 1290 Super Adventure. It’s not mine but I’ve been able to get on two wheels and during the COVID period it’s been a nice thing to do.

“I took a ride with Murph recently – he’s got a Super Duke R – and we went on a road that I’ve often used but I’ve never gone to the far end of, and the countryside was just amazing. I’ll always be a proud Aussie but they’ve welcomed me here, so I’m an honorary Kiwi too.

“That piece of YouTube gold will live forever and often people remind me of it... My bad habits? I’m typically impatient but I’m getting better with age. My kids are 14 and 12 and I’m very conscious of the fact that they’ll be driving before I know it, so I’m trying to set good examples.

“Now that I’ve got back on the bike, I feel more alert on a bike than I do in a car. I wish there was some way of making your brain go, ‘Hey, they both require a level of concentration’.

“We shouldn’t be complacent just because we’ve got a shell around us.”

“I am... Murph runs some driver training-based initiatives over here so we would certainly [be doing those].

“I did both courses through Peter Finlay and Ian Luff when I was sort of in my early 20s, and I found them invaluable. Yes, they were more racing driver-skewed, but I just know that the benefit of someone other than dad trying to tell you what to do will probably be far more effective.

“I helped Lisa Skaife with her DRIVESCHOOL project a little bit during lockdown and I was quite impressed with that so I think in terms of getting them started and understanding some of the road rules and expectations, that’s a very good way to get them going.”

“Anyone I like? They could even be deceased? Because I went to Fontana, to California Speedway, in the late 1990s and I walked past Paul Newman and I didn’t have the gumption to go and say hello and he’s someone, because of his love of automotive that I’d love to drive with... And probably Steve McQueen too.

“I just think driving with someone with a shared passion for cars, that you could just shoot the breeze with – or bikes for that matter, too. They’re probably the two most immediate ones that come to mind.

“And maybe Brian Johnson [from AC/DC]... I went to the Daytona 24-hour a few years ago and I got off the plane in Orlando and I went out to the cab rank and this Aussie voice goes, ‘You’re an Aussie, let’s share a cab?’ I introduced myself and it was a cameraman who’d come from Hong Kong purely just to film Brian Johnson doing his thing in a support race... BJ would be mega to go for a long road trip with...”

“One comes to mind. It may not be the longest but it’s certainly etched in memory. In 1998 I went with Steve Pizzati [former Top Gear Australia host], [ex-racer] Cameron McConville and Greg Murphy and we drove from Los Angeles to Laguna Seca up the West Coast in a Dodge Durango. It was just an awesome trip with the boys. I just enjoyed that [coast] road and I hadn’t done a lot of California before.

“It’s funny how kids are so used to planes now. If I say to mine, we’re going to go to wherever; if the trip’s anything over two hours, they kind of roll their eyes. Whereas mum and dad would forever drive us to the Gold Coast from Sydney or western New South Wales... We were always doing family road trips when I was younger.

“One of the guests on Rusty’s Garage was [customiser and designer] Chip Foose. I was kind of nervous talking to him but one of the things I put to him was this whole idea of kids not being as engaged with cars and asked did he feel like that will impact on custom cars, restoration and the like. And he said, ‘That’s like saying fashion will die’.

“I’m very much an old-car guy. I was down at the Highlands Circuit on the South Island and one of the people that’s based there has a late 1970s left-hand-drive Porsche 911 and he threw me the keys and said, ‘I know you like them kind of thing... Off you go’.

“And so I went for a drive on the roads around there and it was... Well, Sarah often says to me I’m too tight and I should have done it [bought one] years ago. I’ve always wanted a 911 – there’s just something about those things...

“The kids have a fair say when we do drive. Sometimes we’ll do a little road trip to Lake Taupo – about two hours from here – so they’re in control of the music. If it [the car] hasn’t got Apple CarPlay they’re kind of, you know, ‘This is not good enough’.

“I’ve got used to a bit of room and it is nice to have something under your right foot that is effortless, you know – whether it’s a V8 or, you know, a good turbo six...

“Terrible. I sometimes hit the brake in the passenger seat... What else do I do? Worry about the space, if we’re parking and it’s on my side. I mean, with the tech in cars now, I shouldn’t worry about that stuff, you know, but that’s just my nature.

“I’m a fiddler, and the kids wind me up – they reckon I’m too anal retentive, that everything [temperature etc] is always an even number. You know, if your temperature can be adjusted from both sides [it needs to match]... They love stirring dad!”

“Yes, I do. And I mean, it was horrible, in some ways, for its lack of dialogue and things like that. But I love ‘Le Mans’ with Steve McQueen, always have done. I’ve still got a copy and I’ve watched it many, many times.

“I’ve watched ‘Grand Prix’ with James Garner occasionally, but for whatever reason I don’t think I’ve sort of attached myself to that.

“I once interviewed [film director] Renny Harlin on the Gold Coast when they were making that crook Indycar movie with Sylvester Stallone. I had such great expectations for that and it was terrible.

“Probably the best one in modern terms, is ‘Rush’. I thought that Ron Howard did a great job with that.

“They had the launch of it in Melbourne and Daniel Brühl came out for it and he recounted to me his story of meeting Niki [Lauda]. He wanted to get into character and he’d been trying to get hold of Niki for ages. Eventually Niki phoned him one morning at 6am and he says, ‘Okay, I suppose we have to meet now. Just bring hand luggage to Vienna. That way if we don’t like each other, you can just piss back off to where you came from’. They met and had a great old time and Brühl did a very good job of getting into his character.”

We asked artist David Bromley if cars were art... An obvious question... For Rusty, the question had to involve his first love – motorsport. So, as a student of motorsport Greg Rust, has it been about the cars or has it been about the people?

“People. And that’s very hard to say that because the sound is infectious – the engine, the tech is what drives us... But at the end of the day, it is the story of the people behind it. They’re all different and that’s a big part of why I love doing the podcast.

“The car or the bike or the thing with the engine glues it together and that’s what you end up talking about. But invariably, it’s the back stories, the human stuff that I love the most.

“Once you have enthusiasts in the same room, you can have, literally, presidents and paupers talking the same language... And you don’t all have to have the same depth of knowledge about the subject but it’s a shared passion and that invariably leads to areas of the conversation.

“And in the current times where, you know, it’s very difficult, obviously, with COVID measures and the like, it’s a great way of people staying together in the sense of a common or shared bond made.”

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