Sunday started with the 3 Mercedes entries having their photos taken with the 1970s London to Sydney second place Mercedes entry, a 280e. The vehicle was in the museum but they moved it outside early Sunday morning so that the 4 cars could be photographed with the crews and the original driver of the London to Sydney car
We assembled for the rally start in the pouring rain for the inspections and paperwork at Brooklands Museum which consists of the old original track buildings, and where hey have an air museum, including a Concorde, in the midst of a large display of cars and motorcycles.
We got away on time at 0430 and drove into London reassembling on Westminster Bridge with a great view of the river and all the buildings, arriving at the Houses of Parliament about 0530. We met up with Glenda and Bob and had a quick dinner in a little pub opposite Big Ben.
We had to hurry back to the car park to get the stuff set up to start and Bob wandered over to the car and found we had a flat rear tyre, with about 10 minutes to go, so off it came and a spare fitted.
We signed out at about 0730 and headed towards Dover with 3 special off-road stages and a navigation challenge, a bit like the trial on the Friday night.
Well what fun, narrow dirt rough slippery roads through private land. We were a bit slow, but having been on the Peking to Paris and seeing the damage that was done there we just wanted to keep the car in one piece. We screwed up the second off-road event by making a wrong turn, but there was no chance o go back and fix our mistakes, much to Sam’s disappointment.
The final night leg was better than Friday’s practice but we eventually messed it up, got lost , followed some others and ended up with about and hour and a half in penalties.
Some had missed all the competition sections and got a good nights sleep by driving straight to Dover so they ended up with blanket 2 hour penalties, but those who competed arrived at Dover at 2 am for the 3 am ferry.
The ferry was almost empty so some had benches to sleep on and Sam and I had about 2 hours sleep on the carpet. We arrived at Calais at 0730 (French time) and off for a 600km plus day with a small but wet and muddy competition section fitted in.
We did about 180 kms to the special stage start. Sam slept all the way. The Merc had been fitted with country pack springs which lifts it about 2 inches higher. When we got her off the ship, the rear had settled a fair bit but we weren’t too concerned. Wen we made our first stop in France the left rear looked like the spring was failing. So we took off for the special stage, phone and laptop working trying to find a Mercedes dealer and open springs, noticing that as we were doing about 130kph, we had just flashed by our turn off. Well off we went for a much faster 40 km run up and back down the motorway. We ended up starting 15 minutes late.
Then we took of into Reims to organize some springs form the Mercedes dealer, but no luck.
Well, we are just carrying on and dragging our arse until we get to Africa where we expect to have a better choice of parts for the old car, maybe in Nairobi.
We are sitting here on the motorway at 130 kph plus trying to get to Beaune before the maximum arrival time of 4.50 pm
We got to the hotel at Beaun with time to spare and it’s now 7pm and off to bed. 9.00 am tomorrow.
