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| 30th January 2012 |
| Cape Town rally finished: 9th overall, 2nd in class to the Porsche |
We anticipated a processional finish to this rally, and it certainly was not!
The overall rally lead changed during the past 24hrs, the Subaru taking a lead over Andy's Toyota, only to run out of fuel after exiting the last stage! Towed to the next fuel station he made it into the penultimate TC without penalty to take the overall win.
Jane's Maestro engine began to sound sick on Saturday, and since her lead was around 15' over us, we decided to amend our defensive policy and attack that gap, passing her on both Sunday's stages as she cajoled her engine up the hillclimbs. It was not enough, she maintained her 8th overall, we finished 9th overall.
Historic Class (up to 2litres): Alastair's Porsche extended the hour's lead he took when we dropped that control in Addis Ababa, so he took the Class Win, giving us a comfortable and very proud 2nd in class.
- Worst moment of the 4 weeks & 14,000 miles?
- Lower wishbone failure in Ethiopia, and the subsequent struggle to keep the stressed area intact for the remainder of the rally.
Such a simple reinforcement had I done it 2 years ago!
- Proudest achievement?
- We are the only 2 wheel drive car in the top 10 who never received a tow or other motive assistance throughout the rally;
we got here using only the Volvo and our ability to dig the car out of soft sand.
- Choice of Car?
- I would choose the 144 again, and my over-riding philosophy of "keep it simple, run light" has proven its worth.
We spent embarrassingly little time maintaining the car in the evenings - when others required hours and lots of spare parts to be flown in under emergency conditions. - Richard Atherton drove sections with controlled aggression, extremely quickly for such a low powered contender, but equally importantly his mechanical sympathy and choice of route through the really rough sections meant the car arrived in Cape Town in such good condition.
He had a superb event, and was perfect for our entry.
Oh, and by the way he also gave Gerard (the photographer) and the cameraman some superb demonstrations of elegant sideways action!
- Over the next few days I shall publish...
- the list of maintenance we did in fact do on the car
- the (ridiculously short) list of parts that we had to replace
- my thoughts on the "perfect" 140 for the this event.
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