ABBEY HOLMES KICKS A GOAL

Anew SUV may have cruelled Abbey Holmes’s chances of winning this year’s Survivor. The former Australian rules star was planning to lay low on the reward challenge because she was worried about being seen as a threat to the remaining four contestants.

“In terms of my game play for Survivor, I said to myself, ‘You really need to chill out, you’re looking like too much of a challenge beast. Just go into today’s reward challenge and just coast — maybe pull out halfway through.’

“But when (the reward) was a car there was no way I was going to lose that one,” she says.

That new MG ZS is a far cry from her first set of wheels — a second-hand Hyundai Excel she bought for the princely sum of $700.

“I paid for it myself,” she says, adamant that it wasn’t a gift from “my parents or anything like that. They’ve always believed in making me work for whatever I’ve got.”

She also had to work to get her driver’s licence, because her dad insisted she learn in his manual Toyota HiLux.

“He said if you can drive a stick (shift), you can drive anything,” she says.

“I do remember trying to do hill starts and rolling back a few times in the traffic. No accidents, though. They were some funny, but scary times.”

She sat for her licence as soon as she could, keen to experience independence after years of relying on her parents to get her to a multitude of sporting events as she grew up.

“I’d been heavily involved in sport since I was little. So it wasn’t necessarily for myself but to help them out — give them some time off — because they’d run me around all-day, every day for 16 years of my life,” she says.

She still remembers the thrill of her first solo drive.

“I was very, very cautious of course but it was just that feeling of freedom,” she says.

The Excel developed a stubborn habit of refusing to budge at traffic lights, so she upgraded to a much newer Kia Cerato, which was more in keeping with her first job as a real estate agent.

“Being a real estate agent, your work is driving around to meetings and having coffee with people. Then on the weekends it’s open inspections, carting all your marketing signs around. A car was a really important thing for me,” she says.

A second office for her when she was in real estate, the car assumed a different role when she became a professional sportswoman.

“On my way to games, I’d always use that as my time to get ready for the battle ahead,” she says.

And her favourite car accessory?

“I love sunroofs, so I when I saw the one on the MG — it essentially goes the length of the car — I loved that for the natural light,” she says.

As for a dream car, if she had won Survivor there may have been a Range Rover parked next to the MG in the driveway.

“I love the big SUV, soccer-mum style vehicles. And I like to go off the beaten track,” she says.