Last week my girlfriend and I had the week off and went on a driving holiday 3 hours south of Sydney. The driving down, there and back was fantastic. Most of the way its 80 or 100 zones but there are a lot of corners with recommended speeds ranging from 40 to 60 so you could really take them as fast as you want , providing you don’t need to stop in the corner for some unforeseen reason. The new suspension and tyres did well really making the drive fun.

There were a few police around but I was lucky to not get booked. I did have 2 close encounters though.

I was driving with a brand new red 260kw HSV Holden for quite a while swapping positions and going pretty fast on the straights etc, but at the end of one straight when I was quite a bit in front and slowing down but still doing 120 a police car came over the crest but must have been looking at the red HSV as it didn’t see me.

I cant remember the second one so I’m sure it wasn’t very interesting. I did however see a smashed cop car at a small town and I photographed it (will upload later when I can get the photo off the camera phone). Later that day I was having lunch somewhere else and saw the same cop car on the back of a tow truck, then that night on TV they had a thing about it on the TV. I don’t know if that’s really news worthy but it made my photos seem more interesting.

We stayed in a place which was on the beach and when we got there I noticed another black Zed in the car park. When we were getting out of our car and the owner of the place came over and it turns out he owns the other black Zed and is into Zeds to a similar level as myself, so every time I ran into him I ended up talking about our cars for about 30mins each time. The girlfriend wasn’t very impressed, but you get that.

Its amazing the number of people who stop and want to talk about our zeds, its like we are driving a Ferrari or something similar. I lost count how many people I had to talk to or how many people fully stare or give you the thumbs up etc. Which is cool.

I had one minor catastrophe, the road had a fresh coat of tar put on it and was still extremely wet and sticky with rocks flying everywhere. There was bound to be more like this so I had no other choice but to turn around and go over it again. I stopped up the road to inspect the damage, it was all over my wheels and removing it wasn’t proving that easy. The woman at the petrol station said diesel would take it off but I didn’t want to risk that so I got some turps and some sponges and that took it off pretty well but getting the bits off that were on the other side of the spoke were a bit difficult. But I got it all off after some time.

Overall it was a great break as I hadn’t been south before and the country side is quite nice and the driving is awesome. Highly recommended drive if you live in Sydney.

 

MC - take care with TURPS - use kero or deisel as they said.

If you haven't got a good protective coat of wax or clear, turps can do damage to some paints.

FROZ

 

Yeah I didnt put it on the car, just the wheels. Im sure turps would strip the paint right off. Thanks for the heads up.

 

paint on car = paint on wheels
they are the same

 

In theory but I bet Nissan didn't paint the wheels.

As for turps on paint I've done it many times but I always wash thoroughly afterwards and rewax.

 

99% of the tar was confined to the inner and outer 'dish' part of the wheels which arent painted. Even though no one would have been able to see the tar on the inner dish part, behind the spokes, I still wanted it removed. For the 1% of the tar that got on the spokes, it was removed very precisly with little turps onto the affected area and was washed off straight away. There was no paint residue on my sponge and the clear coating over the paint was still perfect. I also made sure zero turps got on my tyres as it can harden the rubber compound damaging them.