Tag: 911

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 [...]

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 [...]

Here’s a little sneak preview of the kind of material you can expect from the Winter Trial 2010 coverage on this blog in the last week of January. This test had a very sharp bogey time and was run on a half wet, half frozen driver education layout somewhere in Czechia. I remember that the parking lot was next to a factory and the fence was lined with spectators during their lunch brake, as we tore up their adjacent driving center.

Mind the hands moving on the steering wheel and you’ll get an idea of how slippery the back part of the little track was. The dip in the middle of the track was very treacherous. If we would have applied more speed we would have understeered over a layer of snow, straight into a wall. The nose of the car became light as we dropped down and I thanked the rally gods for having [...]