A few months ago we moved the start time one hour earlier. Overall this seems to be working quite well.  It does make it a bit more of a rush for people to get there after work, but it makes the nights more manageable.  It doesn’t suit everyone, but it seems to suit more people than it inconveniences.

After the aborted attempt two months ago, I decided to take the Daimler along again.  This time, all the spark plugs stayed in the head.  The drive started out at Shelly Beach and we had a pretty good turn out.  I was there in the Daimler, and we had two 124s, both 300Es, three 126s, a two 420SELs and a 280SE, and a 123 200 manual.   I had seen the 200 at the German car show the week before and it is quite a rare car in Australia.

The drive to manly is pretty cruisy, although there are more traffic lights than I would like.  Tourboss helps with being able to see when I have to stop and let the group catch up.   At Palm Beach, one of our participants is a member of the surf club there, so he opened up and we had coffee/hot chocolates and snacks.  A great way to end a pretty relaxed drive.

Our November drive is the annual drive to Bilpin.

The post MBCNSW October 2026 Night Drive – Palm Beach appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

We met up at Hawkins Lookout, as with last time.  Unusually, it was quite busy, being used a staging point for a roadworks crew.  We left before they started.   The route took us north from the ferry along the river and it is a nice winding road with almost no traffic.  After about 50km, we then reached Peats Ferry road which is much faster with sweeping corners, and then a short windy section of the old Pacific Highway until our stop point at Moony Moony Bridge.

Our group was quite small this month.  It had rained heavily earlier in the week, which probably put quite a few people off.  The weather was actually excellent.

I took my 1981 240D.  I had originally planned to take my 560SEL.  However the door striker on the rear passengers door wasn’t latching.  I managed to round off one of the hex bolts trying to get it out.  Due to the price of diesel, I hadn’t taken the 240D out on a longer drive.  This seemed like a good opportunity.

On the drive we had my 240D, a 300E and a C4 Corvette. All three cars did well and the new starting time meant I was home at 11:30PM, which is much easier to get up the day after. On the motorway on the way home in the 240D, I was thinking that there are probably not too many cars that can cruise along at 90% of their advertised top speed all day, temperature at 80c and do it when 45 years old.

The post MBCNSW September 2026 Night Drive – Wisemans Ferry appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

After battling bad weather the first half of the year, this month was a lovely winter evening.  I took my 1978 450SE and was joined by a 380SEC, a 300E, an E320 Cabriolet and three moderns.   One of the moderns was new C class hybrid, under review for a feature article in the Club Magazine.   I find a lot of the features in new Mercedes-Benz rather garish like the huge logos broadcast on the ground when the doors are open.  I’m sure the technology is quite advanced but its not really my sort of thing.

The new car is quite large for a C class, considerably larger than the 124s it was parked between.  Interior room didn’t seem to be all that great though.

The route took us into the National park at waterfall and down through Lady Wakehurst Drive.  We kept off the motorway until finally taking Bulli Pass down to the McDonalds at Woonona.   It was a pretty good drive and I enjoyed it.

The cruise back in my 450SE was pretty uneventful.   I passed 118,000km in the car on the trip.

The post MBCNSW July 2026 Night Drive – Royal National Park appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

Finding a location where we can do a drive plus have good parking options for the cars is not easy.  Most places are inner city which doesn’t work for us.  Instead, I found a dessert truck in Bonnyrigg which allowed a drive near the new Badgerys Creek airport and then a decent run into the dessert truck.   Like a lot of these late night places, it’s sort of attached to a petrol station.

I did the test run about a week  before in the 450SE and the weather was great.  On the night of the drive it was rainy.  Not enough to call off the drive, but there was steady light rain throughout the night.   The route was pretty cruisy so there wasn’t a big impact.

I took my 300TE along.  Due to the weather, it was a smaller turn out with a 320CE Cabriolet, 380SEC, 280CE 123 and my wagon.  The rain was decent on the way to the drive, but it was generally ok once we got started.   The Dessert truck, while not cheap had a pretty decent Dubai chocolate Acai bowl which I went with.

Doing drives like this that are a bit different breaks things up a bit.  We will look to find more options like it.

The post MBCNSW June 2026 Night Drive – Callum Crepes Dessert Truck appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

This was also the first drive we using a new navigation app the club has purchased called ‘Tourboss’.   I was quite keen to try it as at night. I can really only see two cars behind me, so its not always clear if the group is still together or not.   The tourboss app shows me the locations of all the cars on the drive.

We had a pretty good turn out, probably a combination of the good weather and not having had one for a couple of months.  I took my 1978 450SE.   As well as my car was a C123 280CE, R107 280SL, C107 450SLC, C126 380SEC, W124 300E x2 & E320 and S124 300TE.

We had originally planned to meet on the eastern side of Galston Gorge and include that in the route.  The Gorge had been closed earlier in the year for roadworks. There was a lot of conflicting data about if it was open at night or not.   Since it wasn’t that clear, I decided not to include it.   I left a bit early to get to the drive, and found it was in fact open.

Our new starting location was outside Galston shops. From there we headed out to Cattai Ridge Road, before taking Wisemans Ferry Road up to the Old Northern Road and then the Old Northern Road back down to Dural Maccas.   This is a route we’ve done a few times before and I always really enjoy it.   There is generally not a lot of traffic at night and there is a nice mix of tight corners and faster sections.

Overall I thought the tourboss app worked reasonably well.   I used it to Navigate to the start point.  That experience was so-so as the route it took wasn’t the one I would have chosen. More importantly it lacks speed camera location information, and Sydney is bristling with them.   So in future I would probably use Waze to get to the location.

The experience for the users on our drive was pretty decent.  I set the route up in the admin portal which includes all the waypoints.  Tourboss the generates a six digit code.   That code was in our event booking system, along with details of how to get the app.   Everyone turned up with the app installed and with the code entered, so they were ready to go.

When the event is started, it then shows the location of all the other cars.  It also pre-downloads the maps, which is quite good if going through areas with poor mobile coverage.   As the ‘tour leader’ I had a few different views I could use. One as a normal navigation system and then one where it was more about showing me the location of the other cars.   Without reading glasses, I couldn’t see the actual names of the people, but that probably wasn’t important as I could see the spread of the icons.   For example, for a while two cars fell behind for a bit and then later caught up. Something I was able to see in real time.

One of the best things was that you don’t need to hit ‘continue’ when you get to a waypoint like with google.  For a pre-planned route it was pretty seamless.  On the downside, the lack of speed camera, roadworks and hazard warnings that waze gives you is a negative, as is the lack of dark mode at night.   We also had one member who has a phone with a square screen and the app couldn’t handle that.

There was also one situation where it went a bit haywire.  All of a sudden it thought a roundabout that was 7km away was actually 250 meters in front.  Then it got confused and started slowly increasing the distance to where it was.   I knew that section of road pretty well, so it was obviously nonsense, but it would have been confusing if I hadn’t.  It wasn’t just me that experienced that, and it happened on a bit of the drive where the route crossed over itself, which may have been the cause.

Overall my verdict is that the app is pretty useful for running a group driving event. In an ideal situation I would probably want two phones running, one for this and one for waze.   It will be a useful addition to our night drives.

The drive itself was great and all the cars performed well.

The post MBCNSW April 2026 Night Drive – Old Northern Road appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

Due to the W123 event and the Australia Day long weekend, we had the drive a couple of weeks earlier than normal.  January can be quite hit and miss when it comes to attendance.  Some people are still away but on the other hand people who are around are generally less busy.

However, it had rained quite heavily the day before and it was a very overcast day, which kept numbers down.   In the end the rain mostly held off, and we experienced only occasional light showers.  It was possible to see the big storms in the distance over the ocean, it looked like the scene out of Lord of the Rings where the huge storms over Mordor can be seen from Minas Tirith.

We had three cars on the day, a pair of SECs, my Nautical Blue 560SEC and a Lapis Blue 380SEC.   We also had a late model VW golf, primarily so the owners son could build up his hours on his L plates, not ideal for his pristine W124.

Due to the time of the year and the threat of rain, there was almost no traffic.  It turned out to be quite a cruisy drive.  The route took us up the Old Pacific Highway from our meeting point at McDonalds Mount Colah.   Instead of turning into the section that goes down into Gosford, we turned up along Peats Ridge Road, and did the loop with its long sweeping turns, back towards Gosford that way.  We had originally meant to take all back roads, but I got a turn wrong so we did one exit on the motorway.

Meeting point was McDonalds Gosford West.  Unlike some McDonalds which advertise being open 24 hours, but actually only have the drive through open, this one was properly open.  That meant we could get a snack before the drive home.  Even with the smaller numbers it was a good drive.  I was home by almost exactly midnight.

The post MBCNSW January 2026 Night Drive – Old Pacific Highway and Peats Ridge Road appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

Instead of a big drive, the focus of this one was to try a late night dessert truck in Homebush.  To get at least a reasonable drive in, we met at McDonalds in Thornleigh.  This allowed a very simple route into Homebush.  One turn out of McDonalds onto the Comenarra Parkway, and then straight down the A3 to Homebush.   I try to avoid city night drives as its so hard to keep a group together, but this simple route meant that it didn’t matter so much.

We had a good turn out at McDonalds.  It was a very hot day, still over 30C when I left home around 8PM.   I took my 560SEC, primarily because it has excellent air conditioning.   We had a pretty good turn out at Thornleigh, dominated as usual by the 124 and 126 models.

For the 124s, we managed to get all the main body styles.  Two 300E saloons, a 300E coupe, a 300TE wagon and a 320CE cabriolet.  We didn’t have the six door airport taxi, but they were never sold in Australia.

On the 126s, we had a pair of coupes, a 380SEC and my 560SEC, as well as a lovely original 280SE.   And as well as the 124s and 126s, we had a very original 300GD with the OM617 engine.

The drive down to the Comenarra Parkway was pretty uneventful, as was our route down the A3.  The dessert truck was pretty good, although on the expensive side – the main problem was parking.  We were only able to get three of the cars into the parking lot for the truck and parking in the area was difficult.   When we have visited the Chubby buns burger trucks in the past, they are located at closed service stations.  That means we can park in the service station if the parking next to the food truck is busy. Homebush being busier, didn’t have that option.

Overall it was a good drive and a good way to finish my last club event for 2025.

The post MBCNSW December 2025 Night Drive – Dusty and Delights Food Truck appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

Our destination is Royal Gardenia, which is in Bilpin not far from the Blue Mountains Botanic gardens.  Royal Gardenia is owned by a club member who opens up late for us and serves us apple pie and pizza.

We usually get a pretty good turn out for this drive and 2025 was no different.  I decided to take my 250SE Cabriolet – a good evening to drive with the roof down.   It was good weather down in Sydney, but actually got quite cold up towards Bilpin.

Late on a Thursday night there is minimal traffic, so its a good time to cruise up and Bells Line of road is quite an enjoyable road to drive in that state.

On the drive we had a usual good variety of cars.  My 250SE was by far the oldest car there, but we also had a lovely R107 500SL, three 126s in a 300SEL, 380SEC and 420EL, a 123 280CE, a good selection of 124s – two 300E, 300CE, 300TE, a modern E400 convertible and also a Toyota Cressida.

As well as our usual drive and chat over Pizza and apple pie, we also had some club awards, of which I was lucky enough to get one, alone with one for a 500,000km award for an E220 wagon.

Its always a good evening, but a late one.  It was good to take the 250SE out for a drive, and I had to push it pretty hard to keep up with the 500SL, although I was generally able to.

The post MBCNSW November 2025 Night Drive – Bilpin Apple Pie appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

I took my 450SLC.  This was the first car club drive I’ve taken the car on this year.  I’ve been using it quite a lot generally, but hadn’t had a chance to bring it to any club events yet.   As well as my 107, we had a lovely blue 280SE 3.5 W108, a 300E and a pair of 420SELs – one Astral Silver and one Smoke Silver.

The planned route took as through Ku-ring-gai chase national park, via Bobbin Head.  From there we would turn onto Mona Vale road until we reached the end, drive down pittwater road for a while and then take Wakehurst Parkway from Narrabeen to Seaforth, finally finishing at Brookvale McDonalds.

The first part of the drive through the national park is probably the best part and it went smoothly.   However, when we reached the part of Mona Vale where it goes through bushland, there had been what appeared to be a car rolled over, and the place was swarming with highway patrol.   They diverted us away.   Google indicated that we could divert around the closure, but it was incorrect.

In the end we cut the second part of the drive short.  We doubled back on Mona Vale Road, took eastern Arterial road and then the Roseville Bridge into Brookvale.  As we parked up at McDonalds, one of the 420SEL’s hit a low retaining wall at the rear.   However, this retaining wall was no match for the power and might of a W126.  There was no visible damage at all to the car.

Next month is the annual drive to Bilpin.

The post MBCNSW October 2025 Night Drive – Bobbin Head Road appeared first on Classic Jalopy.

It sounded like a great idea, so I tested the route in my 450SLC a few weeks ago.  I’ve found its important to test these routes at night, as things that work during the day don’t always work at night.  In addition, the state parks service closes a lot of roads that go through the national parks.

On the day of the drive, we had quite a good turn out, even with a few people having to pull out.   I find it odd that the club would schedule an executive meeting over the top of a registered club event, as we lost a few people to that.

As well as many of our usual suspects, we also had a new member in a very nice CL500, plus our normal W124 crew in a couple of 300Es and a 300TE, a 380SEC and another modern Benz.  I took my 450SE.    To everyone’s great interest we also had a C4 Corvette on the drive.  Its a 1986 model with a 5.7 SBC.  Its great when members bring non Mercedes cars to these drives as it adds variety.   The C4 had been imported to Australia in 2011, but stored until earlier this year.  The owner has dealt with a few fuel delivery related issues, changed the tyres and so on.   This is its first major drive.

We met up at Camden McDonalds, which was closed even at this early hour.   More and more of this McDonalds advertise opening hours based on the drive through, but close the actual restaurant.  Since I’m not a savage and don’t eat in my car, this is particularly useless.

After everyone admired the Corvette, we set off.   We started down the old Hume highway.   The roads were quite good and had fairly limited traffic.   After having to slow down for a truck and a roundabout, I noticed the Corvette have to abruptly pull over.  Its lucky I was able to see.  Normally I can really only see what is happening with one or maybe two cars behind me at night.   But we were going down a hill and the corvette has very distinctive headlights.

The Corvette had conked out.   It was able to restart and idled well, but died with any revs.   After looking for a while, turns out the brand new mass airflow sensor had died.  Disconnecting it had the engine running well again.

We continued on our way and the drive was really good.   It was a nice fast route with little traffic and pretty good roads.   My 450SE did well on its first night drive, and so did the Corvette once the MAF was disconnected.     The only downside was a 15 minute roadwork delay.   The roadwork wasn’t there two weeks ago.

We finished our drive at Chubby Buns Hoxton Park.   The Campbelltown location is temporarily closed.   It was quite busy and had expanded since our list visit.

The post MBCNSW September 2025 Night Drive – Picton and Appin Roads appeared first on Classic Jalopy.