What to do when the spend limit on your car is capped at $1000 and the suspension on your Holden Commodore wagon sags like a well-worn 20-year-old inner spring mattress?
Solution: fill the coil springs with tennis balls.
"Thirteen tennis balls in each corner and it's the cheapest lift kit going around; it rides just like new, sort of," Chris Jackson said proudly.
Innovative engineering solutions such as this are part and parcel of the biannual Shitbox Rally, a uniquely Australian cross-country charity motoring adventure which two local drivers are entering this year in their Holden dubbed the Yellow Submarine.
The rules are simple: cars entering the event cannot cost more than $1000 - excluding registration and roadworthy charges - and all entrants have to do is find a car under the cap, raise enough money to enter, and then simply enjoy the experience.
"If your car looks too good or too well-prepared, you have to do some sort of dance of shame but there's no much detail about that," Mr Jackson said ruefully.
"The dance may involve nudity but we're not sure."
He and co-driver Malcolm Noad entered after "quite a few" post-Christmas drinks.
"So you could say our entry was alcohol-fuelled, in a way," he said.
The pair then set about raising their $8000 vehicle entry fee through the help of generous friends and a number of Bunnings barbecues.
The oddball long-distance motoring event was the brainchild of South Australian entrepreneur James Freeman in 2010 after he lost both his parents to cancer in the space of one year.
Starting out with just 18 entries, the rally now has grown into a huge, over-subscribed fundraiser with entries in such demand that the 250-strong field has to be capped and events are held in both spring and autumn.
The rally traverses mostly outback dirt roads and has overnight stops off at tiny towns along the way where there are special events, and lots of cash gets injected in local communities.
Each event tips around $1.2 million into cancer fundraising and inspires some clever thinking by competitors to keep the budget within the event cap, with fingers firmly crossed that their cars will roll across the finish line.
At the end of each rally, the cars or what's left of them, are auctioned off to further top up the charity fund.
For Chris Jackson, there's a personal motivation to support the cause; his wife, Edith, was a cancer survivor 15 years ago.
Neighbours at Royalla, south of Canberra, the enterprising pair found their Commodore and paid the bargain price of $600 on Allbids for it.
The 14-year-old wagon was burgundy in colour but is now yellow above its plimsoll line and a sea-blue beneath, with a periscope on the roof and a distinctly nautical theme including starfish, an octopus and a bare-breasted mermaid.
The first attempt at the blue house paint was a water-based disaster, with a heavy overnight dew shedding the colour onto Mr Jackson's driveway.
Mr Noad is handy on the spanners so with some running repairs and the cheapest set of legal-tread tyres they could buy, they will point the Yellow Submarine toward the Gold Coast next weekend and join the field on a seven-day journey to Alice Springs.
The 3962km rally will be via mostly dirt roads, many of them scoured and shredded by recent heavy rainfall in the area, through outback Queensland and the Northern Territory.
