MINI D blog: Leaving Sydney

Well, we finally made it. Out of town, that is. If it took that long to get away from Sydney, I'm putting our ETA in Perth sometime around when hydrogen fuel cell power becomes mainstream motoring fare.

Not that we got too frantic about it. We clambered up into the dining suite at the Harold Park stand to get a look at the big 50 (pictured), from where I struggled to Twitter in my distance-focused sunnies and had to borrow a pair a magnifiers from Andy (also pictured), which he tells me he inherited from his beloved. Then came the wave bye bye and we were out.

We tootled down the F6 to Wollongong on the speed limit (very big of us, I'm sure you'll agree), through Berry and Nowra in the early evening, stopping for a big feed at a big joint called the Ulladulla Ex-Servicemens' Club -- from whence emanated a big noise via the karaoke corner (leastways I hope it was a karaoke, otherwise they might want to review their Sunday night act...).

I forwent most of the big pile of mash under my unfeasibly big 'lamb' cutlets. Intuition tells me, for some reason, to go easy on the carbohydrates. Dr Atkins and all? Not exactly, but I did notice when I stopped eating all carbs for a fortnight last year that I was fair bouncing out of bed in the morning, and when I started eating them again I went back to my normal ways of waking up feeling a bit like the bed slept on me.

I suspect I'm going to need everything I can get that way for the next few days.

The matter of carbs offers a neat segue into my impressions of the Mini D as well. When I stopped eating carbs, I also lost 5kg in a fortnight, and that's something I could rather do with in our current daytime environment as well. Because, unlike the large lifestyle of Ulladulla, it ain't big in the MINI. Muttley mentioned that driving it up from Melb he'd noticed the way the seats 'squeeze your arse cheeks together'.

So it's not a car for the portly. Not up against, like, a Statesman anyway. The AuNITED event was a good opp to put new and old Minis (and MINIs) next to each other. I didn't realise just how much bigger the new one is than its forefather. Or how much smaller it is inside. That's explicable by the difference in safety and comfort in general -- and it is a safe and generally comfortable car, despite the gluteal compression -- I hesitate to call that a 'problem' in a situation with two blokes in a small confined space...

Other impressions: the doors are unfeasibly, reassuringly weighty for a car so small. These should become the build quality benchmark for bank vaults the world over.

The engine takes some getting used to. Especially if you're trying to drive according to instructions given by the shift indicator. We're going up a hill with somewhere between 200 and 250kg of flesh, blood and baggage on board, in 4th, and it's telling us it wants to go to 6th. And I'm thinking, hang on, I'm not sure about that and it's saying no, no, go ahead, give me 6th, so I say okay, I'll give you 5th and let's see how we go with that -- and it seems okay. There are times when it feels like it's labouring but it isn't. I'll get used to that today, no doubt.

Excellent sunroof arrangement. You can have the forward one wide up with little wind noise and no draughts.

Right, it's 7.20. Time to wake Muttley...

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