The Gift: Passing on the Passion – The Big Picture

There’s a photo of him hunched over the handlebars of an old bicycle, a gangly, knockabout teenager with a ready smile. My favorite pic, though, was taken more than 30 years later. His Yamaha YZ250 is stuck fast in the mud midway through a 24-hour enduro. He’s been wrestling to extract the damned thing for an age, and now he’s sat there, helmet off, taking a breather. He’s tired and aching, but the smile’s still there. He grew old. But a part of him never really grew up.

He could make anything. He once made his own telescope, spending hours a night for six months painstakingly hand-grinding a mirror for it, mainly because he didn’t have the money to buy one, but also, I suspect, partly because he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t be able to make one. We’d sit, backs to a campfire, the absolute darkness of the Australian outback seeping in all around us, as he pointed out the stars and the planets and the constellations in the glittering firmament above.

He loved to travel, collected rocks and minerals, and made jewelry, but his real passion was cars. His taste was eclectic. He never had the means to purchase what he really wanted; for years he talked wistfully of the $600 Bugatti he once saw in a used car lot, ruefully reflecting that for a young apprentice mechanic that modest sum was, at the time, more than a year’s wages. But he made up for that with a quiet confidence in his ability to make anything with an internal combustion engine run.

He had a couple of old Dodges in the early days because they were tough and reliable in the bush. There were also a couple Rileys, scruffy old British aristocrats that smelled of cracked leather seats and varnished walnut. Renaults, too, including a tiny, beetle-backed 750 — French blue, of course — that was running on one cylinder when he got it home, and a bright yellow Renault 12 whose rear brakes developed an annoying habit of seizing for no apparent reason.

His Yamaha YZ250 is stuck fast in the mud midway through a 24-hour enduro. He’s tired and aching, but the smile’s still there. He grew old. But a part of him never really grew up.

An old Mini 850 was given twin carbs, a big-bore exhaust, and a short-throw remote shift linkage he engineered and built himself. He bought an ex-Australian Army short-wheelbase Land Rover and fitted it with a Holden six-cylinder engine and an innovative aluminum hardtop of his own design and construction. Later came a down-at-heel Toyota Land Cruiser FJ55, which he rebuilt and refurbished.

Then there were the Alfas. He fell in love with the 1968 Type 105 GTV I bought in the late 1970s, marveling at the quality of its engineering, the elegance of its design, and, of course, the way it drove, especially compared with the rattier, more expensive MGBs I’d been looking at buying. The Alfa was cheaper because most local mechanics ran a mile from its twin-cam engine and dual Weber carbs, preferring the simple obduracy of a leaky old Austin OHV four with electrics by Lucas, the Prince of Darkness. And, truth be told, I only bought the Alfa because I knew he could fix it if anything went wrong.

Inspired, he found a rusty old Giulia Super sedan he fitted with a trailer hitch so it could haul his motocross bikes. Then came a 1967 Type 105 GTV that he stripped back to bare metal and rebuilt before using it for years as a daily driver. Almost 35 years later, that same car now sits in a corner of my garage here in America, awaiting its second restoration.

He was a gentle man. Capable. Dependable. Most of all he was a wonderful teacher. As a kid I’d be there with him in the shed, handing him the spanners as he patiently explained what he was doing and why. And just as I’d learned from him about the stars and the rocks and the extraordinary world in which we lived, I learned about cars. He gave me the passion.

Lindsay Athol MacKenzie, 1932-2016. Rest in peace, Dad. And thanks.

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