The School Run Grand Prix: Notes from the Grid

Forget Bathurst. The most fiercely contested motorsport in Australia runs weekday mornings, 8:40 to 9:00 am, outside every primary school in the country. I have competed for years. These are my notes.

The format

A rolling start (whenever you finally leave the house), a technical street circuit with hostile marshals (lollipop supervisors, magnificent, terrifying), and a pit stop where your crew exits the vehicle at a pace best described as geological. Points are awarded for door-to-gate time, composure under 'MUM, MY HAT', and securing pole position: the drop-off spot directly outside the gate, held by the same Territory since 2019. Nobody knows how. Some say she sleeps there.

The machinery

The grid is diverse: the immaculate Range Rover that has never seen mud, the diesel wagon with 400,000 km of honesty, one magnificent parent in a classic who has clearly decided life is too short for boring cars. Be that parent. The kids remember the car with the pop-up headlights. Nobody remembers the mid-size SUV, including, frequently, its owner, in the car park.

The champion's mindset

Here is the secret the podium finishers know: the school run is the best drive of your day if the car is right. Fifteen minutes, twice daily, of just you and the machine (and the passengers, and the hat crisis). Multiply by two hundred school days. That's fifty hours of driving a year.

Life's too short to do fifty hours a year in something with no soul. Choose your grid position accordingly.