| The April 2024 night drive was a repeat of a route we last did two years ago. On that night, I tried two different cars before withdrawing, both of them having brake issues. In addition, recent bad weather kept the numbers down. This month was a much better experience all around. The drive was dubbed the ‘Bridge to Bridge’ drive. Basically we would take the back roads from Windsor Bridge in the north west to Peats Ferry Bridge in the north, going via Berowra Waters ferry. Since it was a double demerits weekend, the 240D seemed like the perfect car […] This month’s night drive was a bit different. Instead of meeting up and doing a drive for 60-90 minutes, we did a very short drive and then went to check out the club library. I’ve been a member of the Mercedes Club for between 10 and 15 years. I knew the club had a library, and I heard it was pretty good, but I had never seen it. As the library was located in the club store room, this felt like a great night drive destination. The night drives are normally attended by around five to ten cars. This is […] This months night drive fell on a leap day, September 29. The next time a leap day falls on a Thursday will be 2054, so it was a night not to be missed. The main part of the drive was to drive the back roads of southwest Sydney, starting with Mulgoa Road. Last year we had a drive that started from Krispy Kreme Penrith. It was quite popular, as a few people bought a box of doughnuts to take home for the family. This seemed like a good place to start this drive, as it was on the Mulgoa road […] We started our 2024 night drive schedule with a drive south. This month’s drive was held a week earlier due to the holiday long weekend and the absurd double demerits regime in NSW. In the days before the drive, there had been torrential rain, but luckily the weather fined up on the day and it was just a bit overcast. The recent rain did have one impact – we had to change our route along the way. This was to be the same route we did in July 2022. However, McKel Ave, which would have taken us down into the […] Our final night drive for 2023 was an old favourite. I ran a poll a few months ago for some of the regulars on the night drives to identify drives that there was interest to revisit. The drive from Galston Gorge to Cattai Ridge Road, Galston Gorge road and Old Northern Road was one of the most popular. I really enjoy this drive myself as it has some sections with tight ocrners as well as some faster parts along the old Northern Road. Generally the roads are in good order, except for the section of Pitt Town Dural road which […] Thursday was the annual MBCNSW Night Drive to Bilpin for Apple pie. This has turned into an annual event and despite being a very late night is always popular. It seems amazing that another year has flown by, as it doesn’t seem all that long ago that we did the last Bilpin night drive. On that drive, I swapped cars with a friend and drove his 450SE up to to Bilpin while he drove my 280SE. This time I was also behind the wheel of a 450, this time my 450SLC. Considering it threatened rain all day, the turn out […] The third day of our classic Mercedes road trip was focused on a MBCV Garage Day. The subject was electrical troubleshooting. However, before we could have the MBCV Garage day, we had to get there. We started in Traralgon, and drove to Ferntree Gully (A suburb of Melbourne) to the MBCV club rooms for the garage day. For the once and only time on this trip, we took the motorway. I guess in keeping with this trip, while it carries the ‘M’ designation, it wasn’t really a proper motorway as it didn’t bypass many towns. The drive in was uneventful, […] The second day of our classic Mercedes road trip between Sydney and Melbourne focused mostly on driving the Great Alpine Road (B500). On Day 1, we started in Mt Victoria and ended up in Tumut. We started early, at 6:30AM to maximise daylight hours. Our destination was Corryong for a breakfast stop. This first leg was rather scenic and we stopped a few times to get some good photos of the cars at various spots. At Corryong, we had breakfast at a country bakery, before heading off to our next destination, which was Myrtleford. The road between Corryong […] Today was the first day of our epic road trip to Melbourne in 9 classic Mercedes Benz. Our goal was to head down for the annual MBCV concours event and a tech day they were running the day before. I previously covered the plan for the trip. Our destination today was Tumut. Before we even started, we lost one of the cars. One of our group had purchased a lovely ‘new’ W108 280SE 3.5 earlier this year. It’s a really nice car, but it had not seen a whole lot of use in recent years. Unfortunately all the work required […] Today was the third annual Youngtimer Sacco day. This is an event run by the Mercedes-Benz club to celebrate the cars of the legendary designer, Bruno Sacco. As with the last two, the event was held at HARS. HARS is an aviation museum located at Shellharbour Airport in Albion Park NSW. The event is focused on the cars designed by Bruno Sacco, but other cars could attend. Sacco was lead designer for Mercedes-Benz from 1975 to 1999. His era covers a number of key models in Mercedes-Benz history such as the W126, W201, W124, R129, R230 and more. Sacco […] | |
