Got to do some legal Hooning this week, down comissioning a large electronic scoreboard
sign near an oval as a passenger in a site managers commodore ute.
He decided he needed to look at the
sign close up and thought that the recent rain had soaked in and he could drive around the back way.
Even as we approached I smelt trouble and tried to advise him not to stop, but stop he did and quickly buried the back
wheels as he tried to move on.
He tried a couple more times but just buried it further. Giving up he phoned a work crew and organized a tractor, explaining that the standard tractor cost was 1 slab around here.
It would be 3/4 hour before rescue, so I tried to advise him to drop tyres etc etc but no way and after a while he thru me the keys and said "You try it if you like".
As I jumped in the ute I told him to sit on the tailgate and I started it up.
Never driven one of these before and it took a while to realise it was a column shift automatic ! Only option I could think of was to get up a rocking motion which was a bit tricky. So back and
forth I went into reverse then forward.
Trying to momentarily apply the handbrake on/off as
well.
Took a bit to get the hang of it and the auto transmission made a few unhappy noises but after at least a dozen reverse shift changes I got the rocking movement happening just a little bit. The cars body was touching the soft ground by now
but from what I could tell the
wheels got through the top 150mm of mush and found something a little harder underneath.
Kept at it long after you would normally give up, but slowly the car began to move 100mm back then 200mm forward as I sync- locked in the movement.
Several more changes later and I actually got it moving off but we
had to keep the
wheels churning thru the grass covered mush down into the subsoil and this took a lot of wheel spin and sliding around.
The site manager was yelling "Keep it going, Keep it going" so we just poured in the power and fishtailed nearly a 100m to high ground leaving deep ruts behind.
The site manager seemed quite impressed, gave the project the thumbs up and called the work crew to cancel the tractor and their slab.
Apparently they get a decent ribbing after a bogging but I have never seen anyone so happy after I throughly tore up his lawn.