Category: Porsche 911 Rally

Today we feature our friends Fer and Gerard who are at the table with us here in Maribor, Slovenia. They drive a restored 1973 2.4S Targa with the roof open all day long. Today was 10C below 0, but both got out of the car completely sunburned, due to the altitude we drive at. You find their picture, with their car appended to this posting. These diehards alternate driving and navigation each day, which makes for interesting dinner talk, not to be repeated on this blog…

Driving on some of Slovenia’s smallest mountain roads, we saw many incidents, due to cars getting off the road, in one case even in to a ravine! But Porsches are built to last, so that car was pulled out of the 15 meter deep ravine and is supposed to arrive back from the evening loop any time now. Imagine…

Lots of time is spent in this event, saving [...]

After a mild day yesterday Murphy struck with full force today on the winding mountain roads of Slovenia.

On a Benularity this morning our ignition cap rattled loose on stretch full of potholes. The rotor got damaged and the coil must have burnt through. After a quick diagnosis we were about to call in for help when Fer and Gerard passed by. I asked if they carried these spares and low and behold: they did! We carried the other components for the ignition and the coil, so together we could replace the required parts and we were proud of our friends and our getting the engine to fire up in one go once everything was in place.

We merrily continued our journey, drove our first test in Logatec and picked up the pace by skipping lunch.

The first benularity was a bit of a challenge and we lost some more time. On the second [...]

At 3 minutes flat we tackled this challenging and slippery road course. Little did we know that the organisors had sprayed water in some of the corners, which had obviously frozen and caught us unawares… Despite this error we put down a competitive time and had a blast. We were interviewed for television after the finish, so perhaps you’ll see some shots from outside the car on Dutch channels…

The connecting legs and regularities were challenging due to mixed surface conditions: asphalt, wet, ice, snow, all following in rapid succession, leading to many “human ABS” footwork.

Story of the day to me was the situation Ron and Birgit Lopez Cardoso went through today in their BMW 2002. Somewhere along the line the throttle bar played u an Ron had it clean in his hands, yet managed to finish! Here’s a shot of one of Holland’s leading historic Rally couples: