Home 2 Rome 2008!

UPDATE 19/10/08...!

It seems a good few of the H2R participants were less than impressed with the so-called 'organisation' of the event. Apparently this has happened before, with a few attempts to create similar (or, according to StreetSafari, 'rip-off') rallies. Well, we reckon we too have an alternative plan. One that won't line our pockets and will thus free up more of your hard-earned for what really counts on a mad driving break away from home: fuel and beer :O)

We reckon there are two ways of approaching a driving event: firstly, as a holiday. Sure, on H2R we went to Monte Carlo,Venice and Rome, but not to REALLY see them. We took the view that we were 'on the rally' and the event schedule dictated that if we got 10 minutes in Monte harbour looking at the boats, then so be it. Not much of a holiday though.

Which leaves the driving aspect. If you're a petrolhead then you want to drive, but presumably you want to end up back home at the end of it. And presumably, also, you already have transport! So the concept of a rally where you go to the trouble of finding an old wreck and then leave it at the finish point seems to be over-complicating things. Why not just drive the car/ bike/ trike/ motorhome you already have? If it's a banger then kudos if you take it, but we doubt that many of the so-called bangers on 'banger rallies' are actually that close to the crusher. We all know that the price of scrap metal is such that any old heap is worth £200+ and on H2R it was patently obvious that most of the cars were far from finished ;o) Anyway, back to the driving...

Once you start thinking in terms of a circular route, you then have two options: do you stay in Britain or go across to the Continent? It's a fair bet that most would opt for a European jaunt, but I'm flying the flag here for good old Blighty. After all, how many Brits jump on a plane to Mumbo-Jumbo land before they even find out what the next county looks like? The UK has some storming roads, speed cameras notwithstanding (and we couldn't possibly condone speeding, could we ;o) - even BBC Top Gear did a 'Top 10 driving roads' show some time back. Sooo... why not a Tour Of Britain? No tolls (well, one or two), no ferries, no passport (except maybe for Cornwall ;o), no language problems (except maybe for Scotland ;o) and NO £15 BEER!

On the other hand, of course, there's the British weather. Well, that's in the hands of the cloud-Gods I'm afraid - and it DOES rain on the Continent, you know! On the other hand, we reckon we spent the thick end of £1500 between us: that would go a long way in the UK now that prices 'over there' are not what they were a few years ago.

So here's a plan: let's have a show of hands. If you fancy (as some H2R teams certainly did when we spoke to them in Rome) another jaunt, email us here in the first instance so we can judge the mood. Let us know whether you'd like to give Britain a chance or would much prefer to cruise the roads of Europe and once we know where to direct our efforts, we'll put something together. One or two ideas have already been discussed but if you think I'm putting details on here to have them nicked by others... :^D

At the moment there's plenty of time: we're basing The Trip (hey, catchy title!) on early-mid June 2009. We're looking to put together a dedicated website for the event but in the meantime I'll update here with any suggestions from your emails...

Anyway, back to H2R....

It must have been the drink. Must have. I mean, nobody in their right mind would volunteer to cram into a car for a 1500 mile thrash across France and Italy unless there was drink involved, would they?! I blame Sam... which is only right, as it was she who ransacked the internet to find a cross-Europe rally that she could enter Neal for. Of course he couldn't go by himself, he'd need someone to read the map. Rumour has it that Neal's command of the French language is so bad that he thinks 'aperitif' means dentures. Now a map is all well and good but these days it simply isn't the done thing to circumnavigate the Peripherique sans SatNav... and for the techno-wizardry you can't beat a youngster. They spend all day texting their homies, shooting 'em up on the Playcubewee or whatever, flicking through the DVD channels on the widescreen surround-sound toaster and generally being smug bastards when you can't set the time on your digital watch. That settles it then, we'll take a young 'un along... and see if we can leave the oik outside a Marseille truckers bar, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Buy British Lamb'.

Thus it came to pass that 'Team Neal Marshall' (needs changing, can't we be the Pheasant Pluckers... or... or Norfolk & Hope... or Team Sock Cookers...? Please?) set out on its quest to assail the European mainland in a fashion not seen since Adolf Hitler's town planners misread the scale on the proposals for a new Berlin beer garden.

So what the hell am I rambling about? Well, read this to get some idea.

Got some idea? Good. So, first things first. We'll be needing a car (we'll overlook the mad schemes to go three-up in a Honda ST1300-powered Sooty van, the Jag twin-turbo-V12-engined hearse and a 1917 Darracq owned by some mate of Sam's dad's cousin's brother's nephew's mate's neighbour, even if the Darracq is road-tax-free...)

WATCH THIS SPACE to see what we find, and to see how we get on :O)

Episode 1: Car Wars

Right, we have a car. The rules say it has to be cheap. As in, £100. Or if not £100, it had better LOOK like £100. This looks like a tenner. And then I'd be robbing you mate... I'll tell you what, I'll pay you to take it off my hands. Seriously, it's a fine car, honest. Or at any rate the sort of car that attracts fines.

It's an Audi. An Audi coupe. Not, as we might have all wished, a fire-breathing, rip-snorting turbocharged Quattro coupe, but a rancid shed of an '89 Audi coupe... Neal drove it back from the seller's (a Mr. Steptoe, I believe) place and said it handled like a greased pig on rollerskates. And he should know ;O) I wouldn't: sheep are my speciality, but I digress... Apparently the only time the Audi has gone in a straight line recently was down the side of an artic: at least that's what the damage to the driver's side panels suggests. The seller was having a laugh: "Yeah mate, there's a few scratches like, I've got the paint and that, it won't take long to sort it. Innit." Jesus Horatio Christ, a few scratches? It looks like it was run down by the All-England Womens' Bulldozer team. With PMT. The wayward handling was blamed on "Them front bush things mate, I've got new 'uns, only take 5 minutes to fit and that like, though but". Neal wasted no time on getting the suspension to bits and eventually he had a pile of sh*te masquerading as wishbones at his feet. The task of extracting the wrecked rubbers fell to the young 'un, a.k.a Iain (that's like Ian only spelled with too many letters; apart from the Scots only the Welsh would do such a thing... it's probably Ieouan in the Valleys, look you see...) who set to with hammer and hacksaw and created a right mess on the kichen table. Oh sorry, was I not supposed to say that? I mean, a right mess in the garage. Yes, that's it, the garage <taps nose><nudge><wink>. Around teatime he realised that he had no vice. We all know that's not true: there's the nurse's uniform for starters. Which is where I came in. No, not in a nurse's uniform, I mean the point at which it dawned on Ioeuain that he had no big metal clampy thing on his workshop bench (nor, indeed, a workshop bench for that matter) and called me. "Ian [he called, for that is my name], do you have a vice?". "Of course [quoth I]... booze, wimmin, sheep....". "Shut up you tosser, I mean the cast-iron variety, rubber bushes for the insertion into wishbones of". "Why didn't you bloody well say so then", I muttered, and prepared to fiddle the mileage on the company van again. See Iouoien technically can't drive at the moment, on a minor technical technicality. In Brown's Britain they are so keen to get us out of our cars and onto public transport that whenever you go to the <ahem> clinic they put you through a series of tests and if you fail they take your licence away. Personally I thought it was a bit harsh that he couldn't do the one where you have to rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time but rules are rules I suppose. He'll have his licence back in time for the Rally. Honest ossifer. With the mileage duly fiddled and the wishbones safe in my workshop I contemplated the job. I could see that the wishbones were rusty and would benefit from a good sandblasting and a coat of Smoothrite - or better still, powdercoating!. One of the balljoint bolty things (techie term, it's a bit of metal with three M10 studs pressed into it) was also present, minus most of one stud where Neal had ripped it off, no doubt pretending it was the head of a customer in his shop. Ieouoian had already pointed out that one of the others was skinnier in the middle than Kate Moss on starvation rations and it was a cert that Neal would shear it on reassembly, so there seemed little point in half measures and I decided to replace all three of the studs. A quick rummage produced three M10 bolts, five minutes with the TIG welder saw them captive on the plate... which just left the bushes. One advantage of living by yourself is that nobody is going to complain about the stink when you put manky old wishbones in the oven. So I did. The bushes went in the freezer for a couple of hours and once the house was full of toxic fumes the wishbones were removed to the workshop for some serious interfacing with a Big Vice and a couple of sockets. I thought about sandblasting them afterwards, I really did, but we're only supposed to spend money on the car for safety purposes and I doubt that blinged-up suspenders are going to get us to Rome any quicker...

Meanwhile there were a number of other 'issues' that needed attending to before we could grovel to Big John for an MOT. He's gone all modern has Big John, all that funky emissions testing equipment and computer wizardry... the only trouble is that nowadays you actually have to take the car down to him! In the good old days you merely saw him in the pub and... yes, well, anyway, back to the Audi. The driver's seat had seen better days. Which is to day, nineteen years of fat b*stards leaning on it whilst exiting the back seat had rendered the seat back frame into two separate parts, to whit: top and bottom. Neal 'carefully unpicked the stitching' <ahem> and soon had the damage uncovered. Iain took some 'before' pics but has had PC probs so in the meantime these 'after' shots will have to do...

It took about three hours to straighten it out and weld the bits back together (above). Which was nothing compared to the exhaust. When we got underneath we had a bit of a gloat, for the car has a stainless exhaust that's probably worth more than the rest of the car... apart from the front piece down from the manifold, which isn't stainless and was blowing like a Sheffield Uni undergrad after five J2Os. But how to remove it?! Four nuts to the manifold, each about as accessible as the dark side of the moon <insert gag about psychobabble from the 'Floyd as necessary>. We had to combine three socket sets to get enough flexibility. Ironically, this 2-into-1 branch was fabricated from a generous gauge of steel but had corroded through along the welds. I didn't have anything of the same thickness but some buckshee tin plate made a passable repair and once we knew the combination of socket extensions and joints, it positively flew back on.

A few other minor jobs including replacing blown lamps and getting the tailgate to stay shut were soon despatched and we duly presented the Audi for Big John's edification and delight. How he chortled when we told him about H2R. But he did give us a chitty, which was the most important thing. Iain slaved over a hot carpet cleaner for... oh, literally minutes... to try and wash out the stench from two decades of 60-a-day-man and the interior is now safe to breathe in. Now all we have to do is get both front wheels pointing in the same direction, plug the leaky radiator and fix up some sounds and that's about it! One thing has dawned on us: we reckon this car has already seen a scrapyard. At the rear of the roof are two depressions that have been amateurishly filled and sprayed bodged. We thought at first they were something to do with the tailgate hinges but the hinges are nowhere near. Closer inspection reveals two similar dents at the front of the roof (as though something has been sat on the car)... and when we were underneath in the MOT bay we discovered what looks suspiciously like the outline of a pair of fork-lift forks in the car's floor...!

One thing that did emerge from the MOT was a clonking from up front somewhere. 'Somewhere' turned out to be the left strut top bearing. Iain and I dropped the suspension again and at 4.15 on a Saturday afternoon started (somewhat optimistically it has to be said) ringing around local motor factors for a replacement. Amazingly, one place had one left on the shelf, only problem was they were 16 miles away on the other side of 3 towns and closed at 5. I left Iain's place on the bike at 4.26 and, having negotiated roadworks, Police cars and a town centre one-way system I was unfamiliar with, arrived with ten minutes to spare. The return journey was hampered by it being chucking-out time at the local football stadium so some nifty filtering between tin boxes full of away supporters ensued. Bikes, gotta love them ;o) Ten minutes after I got back, the car was back on its wheels, clonk-free. Perhaps.

The battery is loose. Hang on, about that clonking...! Some large cable ties are in order then. The original clamp is there, and were it the original battery no doubt it would be secure and clonk-free. It's not, so it isn't. Iain decided it'd be a good plan to whip out all the wheel bolts, grease them up and torque to something we could remove with a Chinese-made wheelbrace by the side of the A28 in the dark, in tossing rain and with a broken arm. Great, except he couldn't get the alloy centre off one of the wheels. He reached for a jemmy... Around the same time we decided that the exhaust tail section would benefit from being attached to the length in front of it. The trouble with stainless systems is that the car can corrode away around them and in the case of the U-bolt at that joint, that's exactly what had happened. While we were under there I took a look at the fuel filter and.. found a clonk. The plate that the filter and pump sit on was suspiciously no longer attached to the car. It sits on isolating rubber mounts but these had long since turned to dust. I think I have some spares in a drawer somewhere, probably right next to 2.5" U-bolts and hefty cable ties.

Update 051008:

Well, H2R 2008 has been and gone! The old Audi made it there AND back, after Neal decided it was too good a car to scrap! Here's a link to Iain's Photobucket slideshow of the event... I'm the goon dressed as an Indian :^D

The fuel pump and exhaust were duly fixed as mentioned above but despite our best efforts the clonk stayed with us all the way to Monaco. It was only after a 5000ft climb up to the Col de Turini via a series of hairy hairpins that we decided to have a proper look at the front subframe mountings. One bolt appeared to be not pulling down hard on the bush so Iain waved a socket at it... and the bolt sheared off. At the same time we found that the radiator was leaking after the stiff climb.

We coasted back down the mountain to a small village where judicious application of a ratchet strap to the front subframe miraculously cured all the clonking and looseness that we'd experienced on the way down and the car performed faultlessly for the rest of the rally! Alright, so the front tyres were scrubbing off rather badly but it was a minor issue compared to the lift-off lane-changing antics that the car exhibited on the motorway...

Strangely, the radiator leak never got any worse (it had been leaking before we got the car, maybe some Radweld had been thrown in). The only other niggle we had was on the Autoroute between Nice and Monaco, where the car suddenly started misfiring under load. We trundled along at 40mph, suspecting a fuel injection glitch and eventually turned off into the Principality. A good rummage under the bonnet at first failed to identify the cause of the problem: it certainly wasn't anything on the injection system that we could measure with our eyes! Eventually Iain noticed some patches of discolouration on a couple of the HT leads and the truth dawned: the leads were breaking down and the HT was cross-firing between the plugs. With the leads re-routed the problem was solved and to date hasn't recurred.

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