MBCNSW October 2021 night drive – Clovelly to Kurnell

After a three and a half month lockdown, official MBCNSW night drives were back last night.   The route was Clovelly to Kurnell.   The night drives were supposed to be back two weeks ago, but freak hail again prevented the Berowra ferry drive.    It was a lovely spring Sydney evening of about 20c, perfect for an open top Night Drive, so I took my 250SE Cabriolet.   As I have outlined previously, the car hasn’t been running too well since lockdown, so I am trying to put a few miles on it to see if the performance keeps improving with use and new fuel.

As usual, we had a good mix of cars, old and new. Highlights included lovely examples of a R107 450SL, W126 280SE and 380SEC, W116 450SE and modern AMG A, G and E class models. I even managed to sell a door pull from my 420SEL parts car to the owner of the 280SE. The door pulls were in surprisingly good condition on the 420SEL, and his door pull was sagging as is typical.

The drive took us south to Botany road, where we proceeded past the airport, over to Kurnell and then back to our ending point at McDonalds on Taren Point Road.    As with our last eastern suburbs drive, the group got split up pretty quickly.    There are just so many traffic lights and stop signs that it makes it almost impossible to keep the group together.

This time, we sent the directions to a few people in the group to account for this, but it wasn’t enough.   Next time, we’ll need to send the directions to everyone signed up for the drive, before time.   At least once we got out of the eastern suburbs it was easier to keep together, and much easier as we got over to Kurnell.

Despite those challenges, most people made it to the end point, although a couple directly instead of the Kurnell detour. All in all it was a good drive and good to get back to the regular night drives. My 250SE is running better than before, but I am still getting those occasional periods when it stutters. I want to try and run this tank out to see if gets better with the next one, or if I have some other issues.  The Clovelly to Kurnell drive was good, but I think we have done some better ones.