Google Maps tells me the distance by road from London to Moscow is 1795 miles. Drive a further 702 miles east and you’re almost to the Ural Mountains. Or the same 2497 miles from Sydney to Perth, from one side of Australia to the other: Pacific to Indian Ocean.
When the final section of the only road across the 800-mile Nullarbor Plain, Australia’s flattest, straightest blacktop, was finally sealed in 1976, Steve Cropley (now Autocar’s editor-on-chief and then the Australian Wheels magazine’s assistant editor), and I (in my role as Wheels’ editor) decided to commemorate the opening. How better than to drive non-stop – refuelling excepted – from our base in Sydney to Perth?
