A final advance from the rear

WITH AN ALMIGHTY thunk that cannons through the entire skeleton of the ship, the Spirit of Tasmania drops its jaw onto the dock at Strachan, on the Apple Isle’s west coast. A few hundred cars and a dozen bikes sit idling in the bowels, waiting for the signal from the deckhand to roll out. The year is 2009, and I’m in a manual Audi R8, watching the temperature gauge of the mid-mounted 4.2-litre dry-sumped V8 start to climb into the operating zone. A steady drip-feed of adrenaline leeches around my bloodstream as the deck hand, who looks like a young Clint Eastwood, waves me through. It’s a cheery wave; so much nicer than being shot in the head with a 44 Magnum.

I have plenty of time for the 300km drive to meet the rest of the Wheels team in Hobart for our V8 celebration, but I’m not about to let a trivial detail like that intrude. No, given the early hour and scarcity of traffic on these epic roads, it would seem churlish not to drive like my underpants are on fire, and the extinguisher is on the other side of the island.

What follows is a drive that sits easily lodged in my top 10; an indulgent gorging on that willing, free-spinning V8, continually urging it to lunge for its 8000rpm redline; the precise clack of a manual stick into its beautifully defined open gates, and revelling in the balanced, resolved chassis, supple enough to deal with road surfaces ranging