OVER & OUT

IN BETWEEN ALL THE SERIOUS TESTING AND FAST DRIVING WAS QUITE A BIT OF INCONVENIENT TRUTH, AND STUPIDITY

- DAVID MORLEY

NEVER GIVE a bunch of journos, photographers and videographers a two-way radio. It only brings out the even-worse in them. Dad jokes, live fart transmissions, dodgy celebrity impersonations, you name it. In fact, every form of lame humour from puns right up to ‘Houston, we have a fly on the lens’. Laugh? I nearly started…

But here’s where PCOTY is different. The moment we started our hill-climb loop, the radio chatter just stopped. Dead. No more. Radio silence. After the constant, crackly barrage of pre-pubescent nonsense, this was almost like a temporary armistice to bury the dead jokes and cart the wounded gags back to the trenches.

It’s not that the MOTOR army had suddenly discovered the awful truth about man-boob jokes or that the anti-pun lobby had intervened with firearms. Instead, the reality of the cars we were now punting up and down a sinuous piece of hotmix laid up a hill almost steep enough to be called an escarpment had dawned. And we weren’t going to miss a millisecond of it for all the crap jokes in all the Christmas bon-bons ever made.

And so it began; a remarkable, wonderful afternoon of punching this year’s pick of the crop across several kliks of swishing corners and enough elevation to test Newton-metres going up and brakes coming down.

After decades of PCOTYs, I reckon that very reaction to the world’s best cars all in one place and all there for our delectation is the defining mood at this event. It doesn’t matter where the cars are from or who made them; if they’re at PCOTY, it’s only because they’re brilliant. And that inspires everything from reverence to awe. Not to mention hooliganism.