I hear a Siren, oh Shit I'm Being Pulled Over

Adventures in my Canary Yellow Mk 5 Ford Cortina

My Mk 5 Cortina must have been the first brand new car I ever had. Well actually it was a company car, but I’ve never owned a new one myself. I was working at Tait Electronics as a sales rep selling two-way radios.

Now I never thought it was a sexy car, even less when it was fitted with CNG. Now I’ve heard songs like Mustang Sally, and Little Red Corvette, but I didn’t expect to find a song about a guy whose girlfriend left him because the boy next door bought a Ford Cortina. You haven’t either? Well, you have now. Here are the Lambrettas for your listening and viewing pleasure.

I had a company UHF RT with a 6” high gain aerial centre mounted on the roof. The antenna you see in this picture was VHF. We had a private frequency that allowed for slightly better than line-of-sight communications between friends, maybe 10 km depending on what was between us. With the radio tweaked up to 30 Watts, it actually had quite a significant range. We even had a slightly illegal system hooked up to it, where we could be connected to a landline phone, via the RT. This is before the advent of the mobile phone.

The line of sight was occasionally abused such as in convoy on a ski trip. We could warn each other if traffic was coming the other way and overtake in places where people must have thought we were stupid. Perhaps they would have been right too, but in my defence, we did know that no traffic was coming the other way.

It was painted Canary Yellow. I only remember that because one day I was driving through the Auckland domain when I heard a bang on my roof. I thought maybe someone had thrown something at the car.

I turned into a parking area and there was a duck on my roof, cut clean in half as though a chef had cleaved it, ready to become crispy fried. It was terrible and I felt really sad, but I knew that its departure to duck heaven would have been instantaneous.

Later I shared my experience with someone who knew about such things at South Auckland Motors, who told me that bird strike was quite common with that particular Ford colour. It turns out that for some reason they can’t see it, so when they are swooping through the air and would normally fly above the car at the last minute, this one didn’t. This is contrary to what Google says, but that’s what he told me. It makes no difference to the duck, or what it did to my roof.

That’s not what this story is about though. It’s about my old friend Senior Sargent G. I was reminded indirectly about this story from talking to my old school friend Russ.

I had the pleasure of associating with G from his time as a council traffic officer, through to his retirement with NZ Police and our almost weekly for debriefs about traffic accidents and events, together with Ambulance and Fire and NZTA contractors.

Let’s go back to 1982 and I’m driving in my car, I turn on the radio and sing along to one-hit wonders Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I would have been singing along with this song which reminded me of my folk song days as a kid. I swear if I ever get to a bar in Ireland where they have singalongs, I will know at least half of the words of half of the songs.

I was driving on Dominion Rd on the way to drop off some radios to the traffic department when all of a sudden I hear a siren. It’s going in the same direction as me, and it’s GETTING LOUDER.

A cop car is almost alongside me and the officer is telling me to pull over. I’m positive I’ve done nothing wrong, I wasn’t speeding, I’m feeling quite indignant. What’s with this guy?

I park the car and get out, ready for a debate. New car, not speeding, and the cop has a big grin on his face and says

“Gidday Luigi, how are you? I’m just heading back to base for a beer. Care to join me?”

I can’t remember my response, but the colourful words and grin on both of our faces continued into the bar. Over the years as he was promoted to Senior Sargent he became more serious, and there is no such thing as Police bars anymore, at least not in Police Stations.

Now the irony is that this didn’t happen to me just once, and it got me every time. He wasn’t the only one to do that to me, and I’m sure it was a popular trick that many cops did with friends. I’m pretty sure my brother-in-law did it to me too. It’s like a kick and a punch for the first of the month. My wife always gets me.

In another shot of irony, a couple of years later the same officer had invited me to go to Auckland City Council to see a presentation on the new Truvelo system which used two coaxial cables laid across a road and measured the time it took your vehicle to drive from one cable to the next, to determine your speed, and of course issue you with an infringement notice.

So I’m driving on Great North Rd, to get to the Britomart Building which was the Auckland City Council traffic centre and running late for the meeting. It was about 6:30 am and there was almost no traffic, unlike that same road in 2022. I might have been going a little over the speed limit and got pinged on a test site of that very system!

I was pulled over about 100 meters down the road, and they got the irony too.

The cops were delighted to hear it had worked when I got to the presentation and shared my story. I still had to pay the fine too! My bad. Fair cop.

As to the Cortina, it was an OK car, not a lot of grunt, being fairly heavy for the engine size. Its days were pretty much over for me when I was driving onto the boatyard where we were building the family yacht one day. There was a big chain cemented to the ground, I mean really big. It was there to stop boats like ours from taking off when being launched.

This is our ketch going down the ramp. Anyway, normally the massive links are laid flat after use, which is fine. On this day that didn’t happen, but I wasn’t looking for it, because it had always been down flat. Well on this particular day it turns out it was just high enough to hit the chassis and stop the car dead in its tracks.

They tried to fix it, but there was always a shudder after that, so my canary yellow Cortina got sold and replaced with my next company car.