This past weekend, the Bendigo Sports and Classic Car Club held its big two-day rally, so the mighty thunder cat, the 1983 V12 Jaguar XJS was lured out of its shed with the scent of red meat and the even more seductive promise of about 200 litres of 98-octane petrol.

The jokes and stirring began immediately, and I found myself thinking car club people also had short-term memory problems. Hadn’t we had all these same ill-informed jokes and jibes about Jaguars, oil, petrol and reliability 125 times already?

Ah well, it seemed to keep them amused, so off we went to parts unknown.

•Tale: Car club people don’t take it personally when someone says they admire the view of your rear.

One member, a former Porsche racer, had a newish Porsche and launched into a detailed story of how he’d had to decide whether to park it nose-first or bum first in the garage for maximum impact.

In the end he decided the back looked better, and aren’t we all relieved that was sorted out?

•Tale: my mate Graham doesn’t mind a steak sandwich or two and a cool drink on a warm evening and he knows how to fill out a club T-shirt to full effect.

I wouldn’t have told this story but for the fact that Graham did and, well, it was pretty funny.

He loves his little red sports car. A truck pulled up next to him at the View Street lights.

Graham noticed the truckie was smiling and saying something at him, so Graham wound down the window and asked what was happening.

“Mate,” the truckie laughed, “I think your air bag’s gone off.”

•Tale: Peter and Nicki organised this year’s rally and had spent months mapping, planning, driving and negotiating. But you can’t account for the unexpected.

Like who was the person who decided to remove a blue hose from a water standpipe in Sutton Grange?

Peter said it had been there a few weeks earlier when they put together the rally question sheet.

Ditto with a sign outside the golf club near Talbot, the road sign on Emu Creek Road etc etc etc.

My mum said you should always put things back after you’ve used them.

•Tale: Gone in 60 seconds – more or less.

Outside a car museum south of Horsham, we had a contest to see who could remove the most parts from their car in 60 seconds.

I lifted the Jaguar’s bonnet and looked at the terrifying collection of cables, wires, pipes, and bits. The car’s designers were clearly paid by the amount of stuff they could cram under the bonnet and the old Beastie was rolling well, so I removed – one oil dipstick.

Others got more enthusiastic and seemed to finish up with piles of old oily bits on the ground.

One actually removed the bonnet and it came to a shock when they looked under the bonnet of the aforementioned Porsche, and some first thought he’d removed the entire damn engine.

Again, everything about this car is better … at the rear.

•Tale: owners of old cars are paranoid.

Driving through the Grampians which had been partly ravaged by fire a year ago, cars kept stopping and anxious drivers kept getting out to check the tyres, suspension or to see if something was stuck under the car because of the weird drumming noises coming from them.

It turned out that dozens of steel-tracked heavy earthmovers had been involved in the fire fight and had left  many kilometres of unofficial rumble strips impressed in the bitumen.