Hover Car Racer Read Online Free PDF

pronouncing the last word in the Scottish manner: craaap . ‘An absolute honest-to-goodness cobbled-together piece of crap. Little Bug, I can’t believe a smart guy like you would fly around in this thing. Him,’ she jerked her chin at Jason, ‘I could believe, but not you.’
    The Bug smiled. He obviously liked Sally McDuff. But she wasn’t finished.
‘Hell, there must be nine different cars making up this thing. I mean, I can see why she flies fast, but she must be hellishly unstable: you’ve got the standard six magneto drives along the underbelly of the car, but it’s a mix-and-match of three different brands. Luckily, you won’t have to worry about that here: the Race School provides us with magneto drives.
    ‘Your Momo directional prism is top quality, but like all the good stuff, Momo prisms wear easily and this one’s only got a few races left in it. And what the hell did you do to your thrusters, man? Looks like you’ve been dancing on your pedals! They’ll have to be completely stripped, greased and rebuilt. And you’ve eaten up your coolant hoses to within an inch of their lives.’
    ‘We had a problem with our steering in our last race back home,’ Jason said quickly, defensively. ‘As for the rest, geez, I did build her myself - ‘
    Sally held up her hand. ‘Easy, tiger. Easy. I wasn’t finished. After all that, she’s a tough little nut, this Argonaut . Looks like you’ve put her through absolute hell and she’s still begging for more. I like tough cars, cars with guts, character, haggis . And this car has haggis. Hell, I even like the paint job. And don’t you worry, young Chaser. There isn’t an engine alive that Sally Anne McDuff can’t tune to peak performance.’
    For the next two hours, Jason and Sally talked (with the Bug speaking through Jason), about their cars and past races, their homes and their dreams involving the racing world.
    Sally wanted to be Mech Chief in a pro team. She was the youngest of nine children and all of the others were boys: all grease monkeys and car freaks. She had spent her early years watching them tinker with their hot rods - but it was only when she got her own car at age 14 that she revealed the extent of her knowledge: her own tinkering produced a veritable hover rocket . Her father, a stout old Scot named Jock McDuff, was so proud.
    Jason told her about himself: living in Hall’s Creek in far north-western Australia with his adoptive parents. Martha and Henry Chaser couldn’t have children, so for many years they had raised orphans. So far, over the course of 40 years, they had raised 14 parentless kids.
    They had found Jason at the local orphanage as a four-year-old. Seated next to him in the playroom had been the Bug, a tiny troublesome boy of two who, they were told, only became quiet when he was with Jason.
    When Martha and Henry decided to adopt Jason, they faced an unexpected problem: the four-year-old Jason wouldn’t leave the Bug behind. Simply wouldn’t leave without him. The dean of the orphanage also begged them to take the Bug, too, since there would be no end to the howling if Jason were taken away without him.
    And so Martha and Henry Chaser had simply shrugged and decided to adopt the two of them.

    Four o’clock came round and they went to their first formal class with Scott Syracuse. It was a killer physics lesson on the workings of magneto drives and the principles behind Wilfred Wilmington’s invention and by the end of it, Jason was mentally exhausted.
    Which made the ensuing two hours of pit practice absolute torture: over and over again, he would swing the Argonaut into their pit bay, bringing it to a halt underneath an enormous spider-like mechanism called a pit machine.
    The pit machine had eight arms, all of which performed different tasks at the same time: magneto drive replacement, coolant refill, compressed-air replenishment, fin realignment - its operation supervised by Sally, the Mech Chief.
    ‘Clean pit stops