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At 4 am the alarm awoke me rudely to the first of 8 days of early 911 fun. After a nice wonderful breakfast prepared by Mrs S, I set out to pick up my co-driver Joost in Zeist. Our schedule permitted a quick espresso and we left to meet Fer and Gerard and their red 1973 2.4S Targa at the Dutch German border.

In the meanwhile we are at 1/3 of the 1.000 km track from Amsterdam to Sankt Wolfgang near Salzburg, from where the Winter Trial 2010 departs tomorrow morning. We have dodged two traffic jams already and missed a pile up by 2 minutes, judging by the limited size of the traffic jam…

Our 2.7 RS engine hums away beautifully and Joost and I discussed what a huge job it is to get everything, particularly the car, ready for a rally of this magnitude. Then again, the way our Silverado behaves, drives and [...]

It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m on my way back to Amsterdam from a foreign assignment. My plane has just come in so there’s good chance I’ll be arriving in Amsterdam as scheduled. Tomorrow is T-2 for our Winter Trial adventure and I finally have time to consider how close our departure is now.

My friend Lex and my son Daan have been keeping an eye on the finishing touches to the rally car in my absence of the last 10 days. Our mechanic has been honing the wiring to the kill switch, which seemed vulnerable to chafing by the fuel tank. The Messerschmitt fuel pumps have been connected and double checked and to avoid risk around the ignition set up, Ton has downgraded it from optical to points-based. The logic being that we don’t know the origins of this ignition system (not OEM), so bringing spare parts is not a short term option. I didn’t [...]

The Mechanical Fuel Injection set up on early Porsches was allegedly derived from the need to fly upside down. In the Second World War aerial combat developed into serious forms of aerobatics and there was an advantage to be had by those pilots who could manage their throttle and therefore acceleration, irrespective of the position of the plane. Traditional carburetion was inadequate as carburettors rely on gravity to keep the float chambers filled. Trust the German engineering cadre to come up with a solution. Their Messerschmidt aircraft could pull negative G’s thanks to this technology and the British Spitfires could not follow their trail without stalling their carburetted engines.

The constant fuel pressure combined with excellent fuel atomization, leading to a maximum fuel burn ratio in gasoline engines, had Mercedes, Porsche and later BMW, apply this expensive and complex technology on their race and production cars. MFI was overtaken by Electronic Fuel Injection only 20 [...]