FIRE STARTER

JON Smoother’s ’62 Pontiac Parisienne (left) has quite the history of catching alight, and continued the tradition at the Mud Run.

“My dad owned this car when I was a kid,” Jon said. “I have an early childhood memory of Dad putting out an under-bonnet fire with my blanket – that was pretty traumatic as a three-year-old! Dad sold the car in 1992. I spent seven years trying to find it and turned it up late last year.

“Since we’ve had it, it’s caught fire after doing a shed burnout thanks to the trans boiling. At the Mud Run I gave the car no mercy and boiled the trans again, but this time it melted the fuel line. The cool thing is that we put a call out over the PA for a length of fuel hose, and within no time a guy we’d never met before turned up with 500mm of hose, and we had it back up and running for the last round of racing under lights.

“And at the start of the day, a bloke who had brought a car up from Cootamundra got half a lap in when he broke a trans adapter. They made an SOS call, someone turned up with a welder and they were back out racing for the rest of the day. That’s the spirit of the event, I reckon.”