Australian Magazine
Sports Car World, August 1974
ONCE UPON RENAULT...
Remember when we said months ago that you needed to cover great distances
in a Renault coupe before you really knew its best qualities? We've done
it.
THE 10-TRANSISTOR radio mounted low in the console boomed and cracked. So
loudly that it made us want to get out and walk.
Thirty seconds and 400 yards earlier we'd picked this car up and we were
just beginning the first stage of a fast three-day, 1600 mile (2600 kilometre)
dash across the State - the kind of trip you dream about which actually
happens every third blue moon.
The car was a Renault 15 coupe - the perfect car for a jaunt like this one
- but after a quarter of a mile, something was already amiss. The radio
was busted. Clagged. RS. Kaput.
Perhaps it was the muggy Thursday afternoon weather that made us feel so
bad about it. Or perhaps it was the half-dozen wrangles we'd had just getting
away from the office so early in the afternoon. In any event, you couldn't
have persuaded us that in the 30 or 40 driving hours ahead we wouldn't need
a radio. Not if your bookmaker's life depended on it.
"Bloody Renaults," I found myself thinking, "the bloody radios
never bloody work." My obliging brain had dredged up with ice clarity
memories of the last Renault I'd had - it had radio gremlins too.
It took the best part of an hour and a quarter to shake the feeling. We
were a dozen miles along the Bells Line before it was possible to forget
the imagined need for pops, ads, titillating but non-informative "news
headlines", and half a hundred station identification jingles between
Sydney and Bathurst.
But the road talked us round. The Bell's Line stretches between Richmond
and Lithgow - 35 miles of what's best in driver's roads which has retained
a good deal of its appeal even though they've slapped an emasculating 60
mph (100 km/in) limit on it.
It has swooping straights and open curves, sharp kinks and dips and it can
be traversed in absolute safety in a fluid succession of minimal wheel movements
and right-foot steering corrections at an average speed very, very close
to the limit.
Actually, we were heading out across NSW, past where the Darling River cleaves
the arid Far West in two, to Broken Hill, union-run city of a thousand myths,
where a good and true friend was soon to enter into a marriage contract
with a lady he'd known for years. To underline the seriousness of the matter
our wedding gift - an imaginatively chosen electric kettle - reposed in
one of the deep Renault rear buckets.
The snag was that the rains had washed away a large section of the Barrier
Highway near Wilcannia, and we had to take the longer Mildura way round
- adding 100 miles (160 kilometres) to the journey. That meant driving to
Cowra, 200 miles (360 kilometres) out of Sydney, sleeping for a while, then
completing the other 600 miles (960 kilometres) on the Friday � arriving
early enough for the "small celebration" planned that night, before
the ceremony next day. Time wasn't to be trifled with.
Lithgow to Bathurst is a nasty stretch, because there are always yards and
yards of policemen just itching to leap on your neck if you howl through
their radar traps at a suicidal 66 mph (106 km/in) instead of ambling past
at a safe and serene 60 (97 km/h). That billiard table of a road which leads
into Bathurst could probably take one-six oh if you were sure that the other
neds on the road could drive . . .
But get yourself past the City of Radar and the improvements are manifold.
The traffic diminishes the speed limits (and therefore the policemen) disappear,
and suddenly at least half the people you meet are those who cover this
track at a goodly bat several times a week and actually have some clues
about handling their Australia's Owns at above town speeds.
Now the Renault is off and running. Cruising through the gathering darkness
at an easy 80 (that's one-thirty metrically) is well within the range of
the headlights, in fact the car creeps on up until the speedo reads three
figures. "Ridiculous," I say to myself, easing back into the nineties,
"a ton is too quick for night travel." Didn't feel too quick though.
Getting to Cowra a quarter hour before the pubs close is the kind of management
which can send your popularity rating right through the roof if your passenger
is the kind who appreciates a brandy, just one, before bed.
And especially if you choose to pull in to a place like the Cowra Commercial,
a plain, substantial and somehow welcoming brick place - one of the strongholds
of the fight against The Great Australian Overnight Accommodation Ripoff
- where two people can stay for $7.50, unbothered by "continental breakfast"
menus and toilets "sanitised for your protection". The accommodation
is Fifties-fresh, the room is well aired, the cream-painted ceiling is high
and as oblivion sweeps upon you there's security in the faint sound of a
diesel loco hauling a goods train on through the night. What sane-minded
traveller could ask for more?
I'm repeating the words of some sage heads when I say that if you haven't
seen a sunrise on the Hay Plain in a good car at high speed, baby, quite
simply you have not lived. The best way to go is from east to west because
you'll get the benefit of gradually increasing light intensities, but you
won't be dazzled.
If you start off before dawn as we did, you'll find you're initially invigorated
by the high pressure shower which flayed your back (if you stayed at the
Commercial) but after an hour you're on the threshold of deciding to pull
up {or a rest because your concentration isn't all it might be. The intensity
of the blackness surrounding you seems to impress on you that night is for
sleeping and tries to get you to conform.
But you must resist it because in just a few moments you are about to experience
a profound change. Soon after first light-about the time you can consider
fuming the lights to low beam-you're overcome by an invigoration which a
few minutes ago you'd have thought impossible.
The unreal grey lighting gives the flat, grand surroundings an aura of unspeakable
delicacy, the air is still but fresh and invigorating, and your energy bank
is suddenly overfull. And though thousands of people have been here before
you, you feel as if you have discovered a vital quirk of human behavior
- and you wonder why the road isn't crowded with other people, all experiencing
the same phenomenon. It WILL be a good day . . .
It is quite near to Hay that you decide to eat. Breakfast consists of a
goodly amount of fruit, bought the previous evening on the Bell's Line.
Apples, pears and bananas seem an ideal diet when you're so close to nature.
One of our apples has been rather cooked by the sun and clearly has to go.
So I roll down the driver's window for long enough to know that even at
high speed the well-mannered airstream over the 15's squat, wedged lines
doesn't want to either suck or blow you out of the car. And I pitch the
apple high in the air, secure in the knowledge that any fragments would
be disposed of by the Hay Plain birdlife.
Only there aren't any fragments. The apple simply arcs upwards, then still
doing nearly the forward speed at which it left the Renault, it drops. It
hits the road and immediately there is an eerie puff of white vapor which
hangs over the blacktop for perhaps five seconds before being dispersed
by the light wind.
It is the first time, as far as either of us can recall that we've actually
wished for more rotten apples.
We drove through Hay sitting bang on the speed limits, with only enough
time to reflect on time spent there a few years ago, waiting for a friend
to recover sufficiently from the effects of a road accident for him to travel
back home. The place hasn't changed - it's lazy, warm and drab in a nice
way.
A curious thing happened there. The cable operated clutch decided to stop
working, even though the cable still appeared to be moving the throwout
lever. The problem was obviously internal and since Renault dealers in Hay
are as scarce as GIs in the Red Army, we drove away towards Mildura, more
than a little annoyed that there would be a delay in our journey. Would
we, we wondered, miss the pre-wedding festivities? Would they start without
us? Would our electric kettle have been bought in vain?
All these questions raced through our minds-but they were never to need
answering. Just a couple of miles outside Hay the clutch began working perfectly
again and continued to do so from then on. The mystery ailment was not discovered,
though we have a feeling that it may have had something to do with a dunking
the underside of the car got in a water-filled washaway a few miles before
Hay.
On to Mildura, where the roads undulated more and contained some entertaining
but predictable curves. It was a change to be guiding the Renno swiftly
through rows of grapevines and citrus trees on either side of the road,
not barren expanses of emptiness.
The road to Wentworth, just a few miles to the northwest on the Darling
River, is fraught with nostalgia. You remember with a grimace the blisters
you got on your hands on first day of the first job you ever had in your
life, working during your long vacation as a surveyor's mate for the NSW
Department of Main Roads. Doesn't it feel good now to sweep gracefully through
the black-topped bridge approach where years ago, your sweat topped the
marker pegs you had sledge-hammered into the rock-like black earth to show
where the new road would go . . . ?
You stop in Wentworth for a sandwich - not quite the easy-going, outback
town you remember-now it has a touch of class. There's a brand new concrete
bridge spanning the river which is five times more efficient and five times
as ricketty than the old wooden one used to be. Can the DMR help it if it
hasn't got the same character?
But plenty of things are the same. The same happy Aborigines still sit under
the pub veranda, the same Holden utes with the stains of rabbit and 'roo
guts on their tailgates still sit in the main drag-hell, even the tomato
in your sandwiches tastes of the sunlight which shines here year round and
of the rich earth which lines the river banks. Only the bridge has changed.
You top up with fuel, scrub the squashed bugs from the 'screen and drive
off up the road-the final 160 mile (260 km/in) stretch which, depending
on the car you're in, is either the greatest road in Australia or a boring,
featureless, haul.
The Renault, for all its fine road manners and high cruising speed, is really
too slow. For this is a road which could accept three-miles-a-minute in
plenty of places and there's scarcely a corner on the Wentworth end which
couldn't be taken at one-two oh (around 190 km/h). This is no less than
Ferrari Boxer country.
In that context, the fact that the Renault's ton and a bit cruise can be
entertaining does it great credit. It just sits there, smooth, pointable,
quiet. A gnarled veteran bushy we pick up at the Coombah roadhouse halfway
to the Hill is nonplussed when we point to the speedo after he's been sitting
relaxed for half an hour, telling us how good things are, now that he and
Mum have got the TV out there in the back country. The Renault has a roadability
he's never seen before-he's used to his trusty FB ute getting out of line
at half the speed.
All of a sudden we've arrived. The Pinnacles appear up on the left, and
there are giant mine poppet heads dead ahead. And there's still time for
a sleep this afternoon . . .
It isn't really until you're halfway back across the Hay plain, having witnessed
the tying of the knot, that you begin to reflect on how you wrote months
ago that the best points of this Renault wouldn't become apparent until
you had lived with it awhile. Now it occurs to you that this was a piece
of rare insight. Perilously close to a fluke.
You were comparing the Renault with a Fiat 124 Sport and at the time it
came off second best because the Fiat was sportier and offered more on-the-surface
value. Now you want to apologise. Sure, the things you complained about
are still offensive. Pedal location is still terrible, gear lever location
is still funny, and the Renault still lacks the outright sportiness and
obvious value for money of the Fiat. But consider the way the 15 cruises-and
all that other stuff seems insignificant.
"The Renault 15's best features must be searched for in hours and miles
of driving" was the way you put it. It was a good line at the time,
but now it's taken on the proportions of the Eleventh Commandment. It's
one of the truest truths of all. A fact.
It's a Renault raison d'etre. - S.C.
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