Untitled Document

The Interceptor and I heading for the outback town of Kalgoorlie in 2000.
We are pictured just off the main (well only) Perth - Kalgoorlie link road.

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Notice to readers: This page is complete as far as the text goes, further photographic images will be added and others removed in the future.

I am often asked just how I go with the legal aspect of the Interceptor, e:mail inquires often ask "Just what do the Police and law enforcement authorities say?"
Well the answer to this is that the Interceptor is not compliant with Australian road law. The original movie Interceptor was not, and then even less so by the second film. I will cover the details in a second, but driving the Interceptor on the road will result in apprehension by Police ... on sight. The apprehension then results in a tedious inspection during this time the Policeman tells me how irresponsible the vehicle is, (and of course I am) and how dangerous the Interceptor is. USA readers would laugh at what makes the Interceptor "dangerous" Australian road law is not always supported with logic. What ever the attitude of the Police I always try to not take it personally, my most memorable line from a Policeman was:
"Mate this is awesome, I love it! But shit, it just ain't a ROAD car, but good God .. what a mean bastard it is".

Anyhow when the inspection is done, there is surprise surprise, an issuing of a "canary". To Australian performance car owners a "canary" is not a small harmless bird, nope a "canary" is a yellow decal affixed to the passenger side of the front windscreen, and it is anything and anything but harmless.
This "canary" now indicates that the vehicle is "Not Roadworthy", from the time of "canary" attachment you have a 7-14 day time span (depending on the Policeman's mood on the day), this time is given for you to correct the defects in the cars presentation. These "defects" as noted by the Police are just the tip of the iceberg, in order to remove the "canary" the vehicle is required to be presented to an official Road Traffic Authority inspection station, and this inspection is the RTA's version of the "Duck's guts", they miss nothing, high quality performance cars have failed here for reasons like "Those wiper blades look a bit dry". Anyhow enough said, failure to to present the vehicle for inspection will cause the registration of the vehicle to be revoked, when registration is revoked driving of the vehicle is prohibited.
So what's wrong with the Interceptor? Well firstly understand that Australian vehicle laws are at times ridiculous. I could actually feel sympathy for the Police because on some occasions the law can be so stupid it must be embarrassing for the Police to enforce it. You the readers should be able to sort the stupid from the sane in what follows.

Here is the major issue list

1. The tires are over-width, in Australia you are not allowed to increase the production track-width by more than 1 inch each side.

2. Reverse dish rims, to achieve the rim offset of the Interceptor the rims are custom made and welded together reverse style. They are also too wide, the maximum approved width being 8 inch

3. Exhaust outlet, if it was connected, add on too loud, also a connected exhaust outlet point must be in excess of 18 inches from nearest opening window. If not connected, no matter, you will get busted for the protrusion beyond the natural line of the body.

4. Obscured vision. This is the big one. That supercharger means that even if you were allowed to run one (illegal to force induct a V8 in West Australia), you would still be busted for vision obstruction, exposed pulley wheel and unsealed bonnet (hood) area. So what if you do not connect it, like on the movie car?... well the vision obstruction and unsealed bonnet area still stand.

5. Roll cage, nope sorry ... nice and safe well yes, increases the structural stability of the car well yes ... not allowed.

Nice roll cage , got to be safe so .........."rip it out".

So as you see the Interceptor is an antisocial thing, an outlaw car to the end. Anyone given to be cynical would quickly point out the hundreds of 4-wheel drives with body protrusions, and the thousands of dangerous, non-compliant wrecks touring around the cities. Unfortunately and paradoxically wonderfully, the Interceptor is by design a visual effect, and as such, one that everyone sees, including the Police.
In Australia, even driving a black car, any black car, is asking for law enforcement trouble. Australian Policeman seem to think, " If you drive a black car you think you are tough," Our Policeman are then inclined to (indirectly) say "Driver do you think you are tough ?" .. get the idea. As a result black cars are seldom seen in Australia.
But in defense of the Police they are just people so you meet rational and irrational, the sensible and the plain stupid.
The sad part is that the Interceptor is the most famous Police car Australia has ever seen, there must be a public relations connection unexplored in that fact some place.

So forget all that for a moment. What happens if I do "risk it", and drive the Interceptor on a public road, right in with John Doe public?
Well if you feel like a bit of reading, join me "Back on the road " and read on as I cover just a few memorable drives.

Account (well lost count).
Location: Ballajura, Perth West Australia.
Date: 1999.

With my work timetable I was able to have a few afternoons free, On one of those warm, still air and sunlit afternoons, I decided to drive the Interceptor a few miles across to the "Whiteman Park" reserve. Whiteman Park is a natural West Australian bush reserve, as such the park offers many good photograph locations. With this in mind I decide to drive the Interceptor across to the park in full movie make-up. For some reason stupid me was thinking I could just sneak out through a nearby unfinished housing estate; West Australia was in the grip of a housing boom so there were rows and rows of unfinished future John Doe quarter acre pieces of Eden. As I am sure you can all imagine, the Interceptor on the road amongst the family cars is a violation of the natural order, and it sounds like rolling thunder! In about a mile I pass a junior school, a lot of children too young to have ever heard of MAD MAX are playing in the school grounds. Never mind MAD MAX, the sight and sound get them, and in seconds a hundred faces are screaming for a tyre shredding display of power and noise; they don't get one, I wave and drive slowly on ... But perhaps the last little face beams back at me, a tiny voice cries out, "Rip the guts outa her MAX".

A few more corners and I approach what I call the "Boulevards of John Doe dreaming", street after street of still half constructed clone-like houses, years and years of three dimensional brick and concrete obligation. Yes folks it's the John and Jane Doe 1/4 acre dimension of dreams, step right up and sign on the lost life line.

Up on the closest roof top a builder sees me coming, or perhaps hears me, I can never be sure just what aspect assaults the mind first. Anyhow what ever the cause, the effect is that he spots the Interceptor and signals to his mates.
By the time I reach the corner the builders are coming both out of construction sites and down from the roofs. The first builder approaches the Interceptor and to my surprise he knows me by name, and knows the Interceptor like he had seen it every day all his life. I ask if we had met before, but no ... he had read and just about memorized the article "Street Machine" magazine ran 8 years earlier!
I speak with the guys for a short time, one of them is pulling his work truck apart frantically looking for a camera located "some place in the truck". He never finds the camera, but the delay allows more builders to appear and the street is now like a carnival, people and noise and color. I get a hundred questions on the Interceptor, I am always amazed that the film is now over twenty years old, but too so many it never dates, perhaps due to the technology driven DVD and video afterlife. So it takes me about 30 minutes to drive out the remaining mile to the highway proper. The Interceptor passing through an approving sea of smiles and cheers.

About now it is is worth pointing out that I never actually misinterpret this attention, it would be easy to feel like a movie star because so much attention is directed your way. Such an assumption would be way, way out of line, and the worst case of self importance. I understood right from the start that I am like a "keeper", in much the same way as if I were a person walking a big cat panther. You would talk to the person, but the interest and awe lies only with the panther. So that is how it is with the Interceptor, I am its "keeper". Most times I actually do not feel as if I "own" it at all. For the most part I feel just as a caretaker would, sure I built it, but I did not design it, and I did not give it the screen presence it still commands to this day. It was truly given life by others, for my part I just give life to what had previously been only a flat memory. When people who know of Mad Max see the Interceptor on the road, they get to finally see the car in a real world, three-dimensional format. I am driving the living steel image, but in doing so I am also preserving and enhancing the memory.

Once on the highway I have to pass through just a single set of traffic lights, naturally they turn red as I approach.
The Interceptor sits next to a haulage truck at the lights, the driver glances out perhaps to see just what is making his truck sound quiet in comparison. The Interceptor is recognized in a millisecond. "Jesus Christ! Max's Interceptor! Awesome! ... where did you get it?...Mate that's excellent". The truck driver goes on, lots of questions, it turns out he has been a fan (like us all) since he sat as just another kid in a movie theater so long ago. The Interceptor is like an old friend to him, and the welcome is just as warm. The lights turn green but he won't move, the traffic is not heavy so we sit through an entire light cycle as he takes it all in. I wonder if he ever knew that the lights went red, green, red... before we moved on the next green.

Another day...
Location: The Cobb Highway between Deniliquin and Hay, New South Wales, Australia.
Date: Unknown.

On the open road, this time an outback road in New South Wales, Australia. The Interceptor is rolling roads again, it is early morning just a little after dawn. The outback air is hot even though it is only just six A.M., the Interceptor (as always) has the side widows down. Now at 125 mph the desert air is whistling around in the cabin, at this speed the air is a mix of compression and noise, as it rips through the interior of the car. Just great blasts of external hot air mixed in with the heat-soaked oil perfumed air radiating back from the bell housing. This is the Interceptor at speed, a world of heat, movement, smell, sound, and of course dashed white lines reflecting the sheer speed. For those of you who have not known it, this world always reminds me of films depicting the cockpit of an old piston engine fighter plane, or perhaps even a Vietnam Gunship, the rotors above sending hot swirling air into that open door compartment behind the pilot.
The Interceptor knows nothing of Gunships or War, it was purposely built for the empty outback roads flanked by fire-red earth, with an endless blue sky above. Home is a white-lined ribbon of endless and eternal black, this is its only and lonely battlefield, here in the empty heartland, far from the crowded lives in the teaming cities, here is the only place where the "Last Interceptor" traveling at greater than 125 mph can make its final stand against politics.

Upon the horizon I see a single vehicle, at this speed the Interceptor is locked dead center of the road, the white lines firing directly under my driver's seat, on the crown of the road the camber is neutral so stability is greater when traveling fast I always aim to lock the car dead center. I also know that at this speed the Interceptor will murder the distance between myself and the distant car. As a precaution I turn on the Interceptor headlights just to ensure the driver ahead has maximum notice of the holocaust approaching him from behind.
To reduce the time lapse at the actual moment of overtaking, I allow the Interceptor more fuel, it responds at first with a gulp, then it starts clawing away at the gap, annihilating time and distance in frenzied activity. The roar in the cabin intensifies, the heat and air compression multiply, although not entirely proportionately to the speed increase. The Interceptor hunkers down and winds up to be easily topping 150 mph when it missiled past the 60 mph John Doe car. The 90 mph speed difference caused the air displaced from the Interceptor to blast into the road space of the John Doe car. This moment of eclipse must have caused a sensor overload in the driver. In my mirror I saw his vehicle rock from the air blasted upon it by the "scud"-like Interceptor. A few seconds later I noticed the passed vehicle slow down and quickly pull away from the road surface, I presume to allow the shell shocked driver time to recover.

Yep that's me: Wandering in the Waste Land, no surprise to find I have actually been there: done that. This picture was taken about 300 km north of Broken Hill way back in 1985, and I still own the buggy.

And yet another day ...
Location: The road between Leongatha and Yarram, southern Victoria, Australia.
Date: Unknown.

This morning is cold, the air is crisp, in the shaded sections frost still sits on the ground, small pockets of white waiting to surrender to the warming sunlight of the day. The Interceptor is at a trot, just 100 MPH. The early morning chill allowing the engine the luxury of good compression. This is the magic hour, just after sunrise. To my left the fields are still in shade, a frost covered world of clear white. In contrast, a few randomly dispersed trees are lit by the first rays of the rising sun, they cast long shadows in the shimmering morning. The trunk and dew covered foliage of these trees present a sunlit blaze of colour against the shaded white earth at their feet. To my right, the ground rises up a fraction; this causes the sun to strike the land on the full. The grass and scattered trees are still dew-covered, a golden mix of light and surreal shape. The first warming rays of the sun cause the frost to dissipate in the form of steam, lifting up in ghostly veils from the cold earth. In this still and crisp air the Interceptor's engine sends a clear V8 cry across the fields and valleys. Nature's glorious world of morning silence somehow still seems a fitting theater for the V8 sight and sound show of the Interceptor at speed. On this morning the theater is empty, just the morning light and a black on black car erupting out of the clear dawn light.
In the driver's seat with the windows down I feel the heat and cool in turn as the car passes from light to shade, it is a perpetual sight, light, and sound display under this spell the body sensors quickly flood with an electric alive feeling.
Some days the man and machine connection is beyond dispute. On these magic days the machine responds almost in unison with the driver's mind. This was such a day... I could allow the car to slide with precision through the judgeable turns, never a surprise, the Interceptor would be bellowing like a mad bull, but the control was light and always executed in easy time. As a driver this is the moment of being, the time in life when time itself holds as frozen as the shaded grass. You feel no tick of the clock, no mortality of life, no passing of years, no fear of life. You know only the moment, the feeling and the response ... The Interceptor flows over the roads as if unguided, and you work as a single entity , no division from mechanical to mental, mind and car in sync. If you the reader can speed up your mind for a short time and read like you are full of adrenaline ... it goes sort of like this.

..... short straight, accelerate for just a fraction, corner almost here now, slow, left or right? Left ... yes, switch to the left ... mind the shade it could be damp... The corner opens up, does it? Yes good, accelerate hard ... short straight, gun it, go go, closed corner coming, darn I see a bump in the road stuck right in the middle of the corner coming up, the back end is going to kick out, yes as expected ... straighten up ... yes done, now a long straight, put the center line under me ... got it ... right, get into it ... accelerate, then more ... lift lift ... into the power band, now we are hooked up, go go ... Check speed, off the clock 140 mph plus still pulling hard... good work, that's what we want! ... step into it. Corner ahead, haul back, traveling fast better start early, God I need to get better brakes. Um looks like a sharpish kick right, that's it ... yep, going to need third gear, check revs, get the clutch ... Christ and get it right, get it right! Think speed speed fast fast .. Clutch NOW, go go accelerate to match revs get it get it, done... into third NOW ... done, and smooth... good, very good. What is next? Ah a flick as we kink to the left, a gentle side on the exit should be possible here, yep, it looks good, on the anchors, pull it back, this corner does look nice , OK speed washed off, easy does it, feed on the power, still in third, so watch the torque, steady is the go, get the balance .. apex NOW, apex out the way, good ... right, get back into it... pull up straight, ugh sloppy, I've got to get that tail back in line, ease power, get straight ... yes done, a good silken slide, very nice ... now W.O.T. full power on... and ON,6500 rpm, good, back into 4th gear, NOW yes straight back into the power band, very nice.. Top gear, go go ... revs coming up, check speed, off the clock, 140 mph and some... way to go , Interceptor you still got it! A good long straight section this time, go for it, check RPMs, five seven, five eight, five nine.. That is it, foot to floor,we are flat, one hundred and sixty miles per hour, check on things, engine oil pressure good , coolant temperature good ... engine smooth, no worries ... 5.8 litres screaming ... check for vibration, no vibrations ... none still smooth, good ... hang on now, we are OK, yes this is it ... go go ... stay smooth, stay with it , we will be OK ... I better do my part ... keep thinking ... stay alert ... how long is this straight? Check vision left and right, both clear, road shoulders clear ... I have good vision and run off to the left and right... the Interceptor is on the crest, white line strobing directly under my seat, clear vision and clear road ahead... perfect, safe as it gets ... no ... as good as it gets.

Doing all this in the legendary Interceptor is actually quite beyond the ability of my written word, so you need to imagine.

The Interceptor eventually arrives at a section of road that holds another vehicle, as is often the case we find also an oncoming car that will cross at the exact moment I planned to pass, so the Interceptor is forced to slow down and submit, no flyby this time. Not happy at all, the Interceptor dips its nose toward the tarmac, this deceleration by compression is a wonderful moment, still snorting like a mad bull, the car bellows out it's protest, exhaust cracking out shots of unburned fuel as the cam profile allows fuel to both escape, then be ignited in an flash of orange flame, spat defiantly out at a passing world. The driver of the car we were catching must have heard the firestorm behind him, I saw him glance into his mirror, that mirror must have been full of thunder, fire, and hellish destruction. Because the driver headed directly for the dirt shoulder of the road, his brain must have registered the black shape closing in behind and blind instinct took him over, man he was outa there! I did not have to actually pull out to pass, he literally abandoned the road before me!

So that is just a few drives. I covered these in random order. I could have just as easily covered the drive from Perth to Kalgoorlie in year 2000, or the short 140 -160 mph drive northward from the Victorian border town of Echuca one warm summer evening long ago, ha ha the one where the bus full of party-goers stopped to take photos. Or that wonderful series of drives on the unopened section of the Berwick by-pass, ha ha what memories ... Perhaps then .. if any interest follows ... another time. Over the years there have been some great drives. (see also Pilgrimage). Of course not every drive is like this, sure on every drive the Interceptor is recognized to a degree, but the degree will change depending on the individuals looking on. At every traffic light and on every road you will get people looking, and no ... not every one knows the Interceptor. Kids all love it anyhow, even if they have never heard of it. Compared to today's 4- cylinders, low-slung and big wheeled Japanese cars, the Interceptor is a living, breathing Dinosaur. It shakes the ground, and renders the air with presence, standing still or in movement the Interceptor makes a statement so easily heard it thunders over the technology of today.