Classic Wheels
Gallery 1
Road trips are soul food for the Wheels reader, essential to demonstrating the joy of a long drive by car. Nobody better captured the spirit of the road trip’s appeal than Steve Cropley.
First published in the Summer 2016 issue of Wheels magazine, Australia’s best car mag since 1953.
Growing up in the outback of Broken Hill, Cropley quickly learned there was no alternative to a long drive if you were going to go anywhere. This was no chore, not even in his father’s Ford Consul, but rather to be gleefully anticipated.
Cropley, who spent much of his five years as a Wheels staffer testing cars, loved nothing more than a busman’s holiday. He famously drove an LH Torana from Adelaide to Alice Springs before the road was finally sealed and declared that out there he’d rather drive the tough Holden than two Lancias or a Lamborghini. Nevertheless, Alfa Romeo provided a Bertone GTV, which was yet to be run-in, for a 5500km journey from Sydney to Cooktown and return.
In 1978 Cropley defected to Car magazine in the UK, eventually succeeding Mel Nichols as editor. In 1979 he returned to Australia to be my co-driver on our second Sydney-Perth record-breaking attempt in an Alfetta sedan.
Extolling the virtues and (in those days of 57.5 percent import tariffs) the value-for-money of the Commodore, then Australia’s most popular car, he compared it to the Ford Escort, which at the time was Europe’s best-seller. The Escort – the same size as a Laser – came in 1.1-, 1.3- or 1.6-litre engine forms, while the Commodore enjoyed the benefits of 3.0 litres of overhead-cam grunt. Cropley’s test SL sold for $17,565, when the asking price for a Honda Accord sedan was $30,790.
After cruising at 150-160 km/h on the lonely roads of far-western NSW, Cropley poetically enthused: “There are things out here you don’t know you miss until you experience them again: the space, the sky, the silence of all but the wind, the smell of the run on the air.”
Cropley decided you could go faster for longer in Australia than anywhere else in the world, including Germany’s overcrowded autobahns. “The road from Broken Hill to Sydney – as far as Dubbo anyway – will always be famous to me for the sheer, shimmering distance it allows you to put underneath a fit car’s wheels,” he gushed, remembering that it was here we had averaged 160km/h for three hours in the Alfetta.
Want to read more classic tales? Visit the Wheels Archive – simply log in here using your existing MagShop account or create a FREE account and select this article from the homepage.
Don’t have a MagShop account?
Have a MagShop account?
