The Inevitable Milestone

---

In about 1 week I would have spent a year working in COWI, and as my colleague J Pecina once said, “wait until you’ve been working for a year my friend”.

And here is the question: if all I’m writing on my blogs are about how I’m progressing with work, and then inevitably I would be talking about time and life, this wouldn’t be a blog but rather a wealth management class where I’d preach “make money so money work for you”, “Failure is success in progress” or “Forex trading so you feel fulfilled in life”; and while I pretend to be all wise and clever like a Confucius monk; I’m not all that. So, a bit of a change of style, I’m going to venture to talk about something else, to my life-long hobby: cars.

Do you remember when you were younger, and you were interested in anything that move? Ever since I was young, I was fascinated by the spinning wheel caps in moving vehicles. More specifically, this particular wheel:

It’s unmistakably, a bus. And I’m not ashamed to say even though this isn’t as cool as statically determinate structures or London Clay or quantum mechanics on a trampoline I was deeply fascinated by the way the bar in the middle of the wheel spins when the bus moves. My mom found out this weird “observation” I had, she cut out little paper wheel caps, with car logos drawn on it, and stuck it onto my VW Beetle die cast model; so even though it was a car built by Hitler with wheel caps bigger than the wheels, I was having tremendous fun.

This weird observation soon conglomerated into having a huge interest with cars, at my prime age of 7 I could already recognise every mainstream car model, when I was 9 I could tell different Mercedes Benz models from just the headlights; while everyone was talking about Gundams or Dragon Balls Z I was whizzing my pathetic toy car in my bed like a lunatic; and when Top Gear came along I quickly decided that was my favourite TV show; and instead of PewDiePie or Smosh or KSI my YouTube recommendation was filled with CarWOW, CarThrottle and MightyCarMods.

Secondary School years came and gone, University life happened without happening and soon as university finished, I got my driving license in 5 weeks and bought a cute silver 2010 Renault Clio 1.2 tCE 2 days after passing my driving test.

Learning how to drive and actually driving a car was completely different; I learnt how to drive in a humble Ford Fiesta Diesel, but my silver-warrior was a small petrol. Driving the car off the dealership was a challenge in itself already mainly because I couldn’t set off just with the clutch, I had to press the accelerator while clutching out, which in itself went against everything my driving instructor taught me, but shortly after I found myself bombing along the A4232 along Cardiff Bay, with the faint wizz from the turbo churring me on. I really enjoyed this lovely car, I enjoyed it so much I kissed it onto a stone wall 4 days later and had to get it repainted, for £200.

My first ever motorway run was when I was moving out of Cardiff to London, where I put 4 years’ worth of living luggage in the car and it was so stuffed it was as if half of Kim Kardashian’s bottom was sitting on my car. Nonetheless by ignoring the 70mph speed limit on the motorway meant I was flying down the M4 in a speed I couldn’t possibly write it out unless I want to spend time in a jail. And because of there’s a turbo in this car it was such a hoot to drive. Hell, this car can even do wheel spins at the traffic lights. It really was quite a character.

But while I was overtaking a lot of cars that were going well below the speed limit, inside the Clio everything was refined and restrained, and surprisingly with the 5-speed gearbox at motorway speed the engine wasn’t making a lot of noise either. The windscreen was so wide and huge you felt like you were doing a Naruto run in real life, and the ride was comfortable too, just because it was a small car for less than the price of a Macbook (or half a kidney) there wasn’t any compromise. Yes it was cloth interior and horrible plastics were everywhere but you cannot reasonably expect to get sirloin steak when you are paying for minced.

The car was very roly-poly during corners, it almost felt as if I was trying to steer Burj Khalifa in a hurricane, and the steering was so inert it felt like I was opening a safe. But that was not the point of this car, not for me anyways. This was a car for me to get used to driving. I had to learn how to drive properly first, how to change gears smoothly, how to avoid putting the clutch down when cornering (very dangerous – don’t do it!), before I learnt to do some spirited driving. No one in their right mind buys a Renault Clio 1.2 turbo to tackle country roads; they buy a Renault Clio to sit in a metal cage to transport them from A to B, or deliver takeaway. For these purposes the Clio was well capable of its job.

After living in my first shared house in Isle of Dogs, I moved to a place near Poplar, where my street is full of mechanics. During Christmas Day, when my parents were visiting me in London, the Clio had an engine misfire and left us stranded in Central London. Soon after the problems in the Clio came in thick and fast and since in this new house I had to pay a substantial amount of money for the parking each month, I didn’t feel this car deserved this level of recognition – if I were to pay that money for the parking each month I would like to have a car that I would look back couple times after parking up. While the Clio was great at its job, it didn’t really create an emotional stir for me.

And as I was browsing through Autotrader, I came across my dream car – Alfa Romeo 159 with the 1.8MPi engine, for about £3500.

Okay my dream car was not with the 1.8L engine, my dream car would have had the 3.2L V6 option but you can’t drive a 3.2L at 22 years old – it’s just antisocial. So I stayed humble and chose the cheapest option. But that shape of the 159 – oh my!

The 159 held a very special place in my heart, I remember seeing one inside the dealership that sold Ferrari and Maserati in Hong Kong when I was about 13. In a showroom full of 2-door Ferraris and 4-door Maseratis, the all-black 159 stood in the showroom in all its pride and glory; the triple headlights, the Scudetto Grille, the long bonnet and the short boot meant this car looked as if Brat Pitt was Maserati and Angelina Jolie was Ferrari and they gave birth to this angel-looking child called Alfa Romeo; it was sinfully gorgeous, and it had never been forgotten.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw the 159 on sale for such a low price; and when I viewed the car I found out why. The windscreen rattled at high speed during the test drive, the previous owner had sold it for cheap. I went online and realised the windscreen rattle was a common problem and it had an easy DIY fix, so I decided I would take the chances.

I drove home from the dealership, parked it in the car park and I simply could not resist the urge to look back. It stood well between a 1982 Toyota Celica and a 2017 Mercedes S Class, it was a dream come true.

What also comes true, is that Alfa Romeo always makes cars as good as they can be…briefly. The problems I had encountered with this car was quite a lot more than usual; namely all the bushes in the steering and the suspension arms were worn and had to be replaced, the water pump AND the head gasket went at the same time; wheel bearings were worn and had to be replaced as well; the paint quality was a joke… it was a nightmare to maintain.

The equipment of the car also made very little sense, there is only one cup holder in the entire cabin and I couldn’t even put a medium sized cup of coffee in it; the windscreen wiper is more “possessed” than it is “automatic”; the indicator stalk is too close to the cruise control stalk – and I am saying that after owning the car for almost a year; the boot release button is on the roof; the window switches are located far too forward at the door armrest; but the centre armrest is air-conditioned! Which would be a splendid idea if only I can fit a Twix bar in it. It almost seemed as if some sort of intern designed the interior and the electronics and got signed off by a supervisor who had an argument with his wife the night before and was wilfully uninterested in everything the day after.

But all would be forgiven when I take it down the mountain road and very soon I realised all the brightest, most expensive engineers in Alfa Romeo had a bigger fish to fry. As I heel-toe into a corner, the steering Is so quick as if I am directing a lightning show; and because this is an old car it was set up with a traditional hydraulic power steering instead of the more modern electric power steering, which meant the steering feels solid and it feels authentic; Alfa Romeo even locked the accountant in a basement and put multi-link suspension at the rear wheels, the result is the car corners grippy, flat and composed….And the engine – oh the lovely 4 cylinder engine.

Because it is only a 1.8L engine (it’s a very small engine in a car that weighs 1400kg) I have to give it all the beans to get the car going, but the exhaust note is so rough it sounds as if the car had a boxer engine – it sounds like a rally car! The engine goes from throaty like Andrea Bocelli singing in the Royal Albert Hall at low revs, to an enthusiastic hollow scream, like Adele singing through a metal pipe after 4000rpm.

This is a car that encourages me to take it to the max, As I approach a corner, heel-toe the brake and clutch and row through the short shifter (yes, a short shifter, exactly like what you would get in a Ferrari 360, as standard! Not even the BMW M5 has a short shifter!) to keep the engine revs high, and slowly squeeze the throttle and feel the car pulling away from the corner. This car is not for the straight lines, it is for the corners.

The engine noise, the steering, the grip, and the gear change, all combined into an experience in which not even Shakespeare could describe it in a play. It is nowhere close to being the best car in the world, but as a tool to make me feel special, nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to this.

And because I am living on a street full of mechanics, I have become friends with them, namely Azad and Azim. Azad is a very experienced mechanic who after realising my interest in working with cars, have taken me as his apprentice and I have spent some weekends working with him on other cars. Azim is a bodywork specialist and he taught me how to do a respray after some Prius owner scrapped my front bumper, and we did project cars and we did adventures together. So now during weekends I would either be working on my car or bringing my car out for a drive, and this neatly brings me to my life.

I have a very stubborn and committed personality, because I have decided I will be as great of an engineer as I can be before I retire, I committed every single minute of my time not working trying to perfect the trade, trying to understand more about geotechnical engineering. But from my observation even the best engineer in the office has a hobby – we have a senior engineer working full time on a project, and he competes in marathon – he even competed in the Doha World Athletic Championship and he is about to be qualified for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games; we have a principle engineer who loves sailing and a technical director who, at 56 years old, still participates in triathlon every year. Seems like if I want to be as great of an engineer I can be, as these achieved individuals are, there is a lot more than just understanding geotechnical engineering, and I need to divert that passion away from something else before I burn out. I am so glad I’m reunited with my lifelong passion with cars.

Designing the foundation of the viaducts was fascinating and I cannot express how grateful I am to get the level of experience and exposure of geotechnical engineering that other people might not have got, and how my supervisor is very trusted in me I can be the person responsible for scoping the ground investigation, developing the ground model, running the assessment and producing output – the cradle to grave of a geotechnical assessment, but I’m more grateful of the fact I have got my life together – I can spend time doing additional reading on my work and when I need a rest, I can happily go to the car park and start doing some work on my car. Be it giving a detailed deep clean, to replacing certain parts of the car, to doing resprays. There would always be things that I would look forward to when I wake up in the morning, and there would always be things I look forward to whenever I feel like taking a break.

To conclude, this has been a good year, and it has been a good start to my adult life. I think this is a good conclusion to the past year, and it is setting a tone for many years to come.

And this blog has taken me 3 months to finish – in fact I’m writing this on my way to San Franciso to visit my friend Tunde right now. So I guess this is a tone for many years to come as well.