HOW ABOUT some useless weekend trivia to kick off the last weekend of the first month of 2022?
This week with my more than casual interest in super cars, I was trying to find out more about the Bugatti Chiron.
The reason for my interest was because I read an article where Czech real estate tycoon Radim Passer was ‘reprimanded’ by the German Transport Ministry for a video he posted of him driving his Chiron at an eye-watering 417 km/h on the Autobahn between Berlin and Hannover.
The section of the road used for the test has no fixed speed limit, so Passer didn’t technically break the law, but the Transport Ministry said that it rejects any behaviour that can lead to endangering road users.
The new Chiron has a delightful price tag of $3.3 million (that’s a whisper under R50 million). But that’s the base model. The Chiron Super Sport melts your pacemaker’s batteries at a whopping $3.9 million (just over R59 million).
At top speed the new Chiron will drain its 100-litre tank in nine minutes; to put that into perspective if road conditions were favourable, you could – theoretically – drive from Kimberley to Johannesburg in just over an hour in a Chiron. But then you’d also have to fork out around two grand to fill up … and you’d have to fill up eight times.
Of course, to keep a car that powerful on the road you need some good rubber underneath. A set of Bugatti tyres can set you back around R650,000. For some perspective, a brand new BMW X1 sDrive18d costs around R679,582. Read that again, four tyres of one car is roughly the price of a luxury German SUV that tops out at 209km/h.
I imagined a drag race between these two cars, and I imagined that because I had a ‘Bugatti experience’ just this past week.
Here’s how it happened: I had been a bit lazy, not cycling for three months, so I thought that I’d better walk away from my workstation and get some kilometres into my legs.
And there I was on a typical scorching Northern Cape day in the late afternoon in late January with a saddle cutting off the blood supply to my legs. My lungs were burning and the sweat was pouring but I was rather pleased that it was going better than I expected after the lengthy lay-off.
That’s because the wind had been at my back on the way out. When I turned around to head home, with my energy reserves all but depleted, I was straining against what felt like a hurricane.
Just then I heard something behind me; I glanced around and a young man – probably in his mid-20s – came whizzing past on his bike. Yes, whizzing!
It wasn’t so much how easily he was pedalling that got me; it was the polite “middag oupa”.
“Oupa eh,” I thought to myself, “I will show you an ‘oupa’.”
With a casual flick of my fingers I selected a lighter gear. But one lighter gear would be for if he had called me “oom”; he had said “oupa” … I changed two more gears. I had 24 gears under me. I looked at his bicycle, and chuckled to myself. He had one.
Here I was in my full aerodynamic and efficient cycling kit; and he was wearing a baggy overall, floppy cap, work boots; all while carrying a backpack.
This was going to be a slaughter.
And as he grew smaller and smaller ahead of me, I decided that it was not worth it trying to embarrass the young man, and rather decided to admire how green the veld was after the recent rains. Yes, I was going that slow.
It’s not that I gave up. I am not a quitter. It’s just that it felt like he was riding a Bugatti Chiron and I was on … well, a 24-speed bicycle.
No amount of fancy clothing, nor shoes, nor a plethora of gears and no amount of determination could help me keep up with someone who’s fit and who obviously has been cycling for a long, long time. And I had to accept that.
Though his bicycle was not new by any stretch of the imagination, he was using it better than I was using my 24-speed masterpiece, and his bike must have cost considerably less. His cycle was a tool and not a status symbol.
Recently I have been receiving marketing phone calls and e-mails encouraging me to upgrade my cellphone. Yes, I have had my current handset for quite a number of years now but it’s still chugging along just fine.
Sure, I have seen some impressive new devices on the market, but the thing is, I don’t NEED a new ‘status symbol phone’ because my ‘tool phone’ is working just fine at the moment.
I wonder if the people waiting in front of telecom stores are there to sign up for new contracts. I have noticed that the queues are seemingly endless and they sometimes wait so long that they even seem to be covered in dust … or maybe it’s Telkom Powder they’re covered in.
Sorry, that was naughty. But the point is, we are constantly exposed to marketing and advertising aimed at convincing us that we need the next new thing to make us happy. In fact economies depend on money being spent, so who can blame the advertisers?
What the advertisers and marketers and telemarketers are doing is trying to make us forget that early 2022 could be the perfect time to tighten our belts, stop splurging, actually start living within our means and maybe even try to save a few bob every month to soften the January 2023 punch that we all know is coming.
Comic Groucho Marx cracked me up when he said, “Why, look at me. I’ve worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”
We should perhaps stop working so hard to impress and rather work smart to thrive.
