BAD IDEAS ARE AWESOME!

How good was Muscle Car Madness this year? The number of crazy creations cruising around has to be a new record. I’m not quite sure how some of the guys and girls dream up some of these things, but they’re equal parts absurd and impressive.

I guess that there’s a message in that for the rest of us. While we strive so hard for perfection on our vehicles, often it’s the imperfections that make them interesting or enjoyable. We all want more, we all want to be better, we all want what someone else has got — it’s all too easy to get into that mindset. I think it’s important to stop sometimes, take time to ‘smell the roses’, as they say, and appreciate what we’ve got.

I know that this comment is somewhat ironic when I spend so much time trying to encourage car owners to do exactly that: build it better, bigger, faster. Overall, though, I think the life of a Kiwi car guy or girl is pretty good, and we all too often forget that. Probably the best thing about all of these showground builds of the Muscle Car Madness type — besides the number of smiles they bring to people’s faces — is the lessons they teach the owners. When we are working on or building a proper / high-end / detailed car, every aspect needs to be as perfect as possible for us to be happy. Working on a beater allows us to fine-tune our skills without fear of imperfection. It’s a great way to tackle aspects of builds we normally wouldn’t, be it paint, fabrication, mechanical, or anything else — after all, we’re not going to wreck valuable or irreplaceable parts doing it. It may even be a good way to get the kids or someone who’s new to the scene involved, as they’ll never get a better chance to learn than by working on something where it doesn’t matter if they get it wrong.

Hot rodding was born out of experimentation such as this. Back then, there was no such thing as replicating the old days or doing it wrong, so why are we so fixated on that now?

And how much fun were they having driving those carefree creations? A whole lot more than the people driving the perfect ones, that’s for sure!

If you’ve not yet seen what went on at

Muscle Car Madness, check out our article on it in the next issue. We’d love to have been able to squeeze the coverage into this issue, but, with so much going on at this time of year, we just haven’t been able to make it fit. I don’t generally like holding on to event coverage, as these days we’re competing against the internet in terms of timeliness, and it’s a battle that print can’t win. Of course, the difference between print and a gallery on social media is that we’ll bring you the actual information to match. Print’s not dead, and neither is having fun in a car that you don’t care about! Catch you next month.