By lunchtime, we had moved up to 27th in the Classic category and 9th in
class.
All we really needed now was for everyone else to lose a couple of hours. We
certainly weren't going to catch them on the late afternoon autotest back at
Aix-les'Bains. We lost several seconds when I twirled the steering wheel so
enthusiastically that the front wheels ended up perpendicular to the intended
direction of travel, putting us four seconds over the fastest time. At that
night's dinner, I talked to some of the marshalls, who stand for hours at the
roadside as 220 cars whizz past at no less than one-minute intervals, before
dashing off to their next location. The logistics of the event - the Monte
Carlo Challenge os Europe's biggest old-car rally - are daunting indeed.
I was quite pleased at our relatively early start time for the run to Aix-en-
Provence on Wednesday and downed two cups of coffee - a big mistake. A couple
of hours later, on a tight, twisty section, the little Triumph could be seen
roaring from precipice to precipice, with it's driver desperately suppresing a
pee. We would lose time, but with 14km to the next control, I simply had to
stop and relieve myself against a rock, thinking wistfully of the hygenic
portable car loo buried in a desk drawer at work; endurance rally drivers in
the Fifties used a long tube to the outside of the car.
Temperatures rose and the snow disappeared as we raced south. An average speed
of 30 mph doesn't sound very fast, but on narrow, bumpy, twisty roads it takes
some doing.
We dropped a few minutes when Tony miscalculated the time available on one
section, but he was a wizard with the maps and I began to understand the sense
of satisfaction a navigator must feel when every turn is the right one. The
last "regularity" section of the day saw us trying to maintain a precise
average speed through a maze of identical forest roads and multiple junctions
in complete darkness. It didn't help that our supplementary Brantz trip meter
started to give two different reading simultaneously; Tony had already
discovered that the digits were too small to read clearly, and his knees kept
hitting the reset buttons.
What the car really needs is an old Halda trip, as originally developed for
taxi drivers; if any reader has one tucked away in the attic, I would be most
interested...
cont.
|