The last day, will Molly Porsche make it ?

Day 25 the last day.

This is always an exciting day in any rally. You have nearly finished but you still have to get across the finish line. Every knock, rattle and bang are heart stopping moments as you fear the worse and may be the car or you won't make it. its only about 400km what can go wrong?

There are two ways to go today. 

One along the main tarmac road and the other over the Cederberg Pass. Its worth looking this up and watching videos of guys on trial bikes trying to do this pass. 

We are doing it in very tired and battered rally cars. I have no idea what the scenery was like because I couldn’t take my eyes of this mountain goat track of a road. We think it is the final sting in the tail of this great rally and a way of eventually braking Molly. But no, she won’t give up, some of the gradient is so steep we are in 1st gear going up and coming down. We did stop every now and again and I must admit the scenery was stunning.

Alas one poor car the Jeepster of Dick and Matilde didn’t make it, they had to be towed and trucked out.

After this we eventually get onto tarmac roads and head for The Cape of Good Hope, passing through fantastic Alpine like scenery and some brilliant twisty turny roads and Molly has a rather spirited race with an MGB :)

There has been a competition to see if any car can finish the event without any mechanical assistance. Its amazing how many rattles and bangs you can hear and feel over the last 20km.

We drive onto the tip of The Cape of Good Hope at 4.00pm we have finished!!!!!  We have covered 9125 km not the 7000 we thought we were doing.

Having crossed the finishing line we then have to drive back to the hotel in Cape Town, the route takes us along Chapman's Peak Drive. I have taken an extract from www.dangeriousroads.org website, take their word for it not mine :) What a way to finish.

Situated on the Atlantic Coast, Chapman’s Peak Drive is one of the most spectaculars roads in the world. With a length of 9km, winds it way between Noordhoek and Hout Bay, at the south-western tip of South Africa. The road is part of the M6.

This short road, with 114 curves, skirts the rocky coastline of Chapman's Peak and offers stunning 180° views of the western side of the CapePeninsula. It is widely regarded as one of the most scenic stretches of road anywhere in the world.

We have had the most fabulous time, we have made great new friends and we have discovered a place called Southern Africa. Sometimes this rally has bought us to tears. These have been tears of laughter and tears of total joy and overwhelming awe at the beauty of this quite incredible continent. 

Thank you Endurance Rally Association for a marvellous event. We will do it again. Thank you to Gantspeed Engineering for preparing Molly and making her such a joy to drive. Lets see if Molly can reach 30,000km of competitive rallying without any mechanical problemsI I would also like to thank Molly for keeping us safe and my wonderful wife Julie who has now navigated us some 25,000 competitive rally kilometres without a mistake, all I do is do as i’m told and steer Molly. i wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thank you for reading our blog, we hope you have enjoyed it and may be inspired you go rallying and have your own adventures :)

On to Bhutan our next rally in 2015.

Go, go, go Molly.
Nearly forgot to mention we came 9th overall, which is way beyond our expectations :)
Full results can be seen on Endurance Rally Association results

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David, Julie and Molly Porsche 

Our own P2P or points and puncture, two very long days

day 23, A very big driving day of 587 km from Namib Desert Lodge to Fish River Canyon.

Sorry we have missed a few days but the connection was bad and we were pretty exhausted.

The last few days have been fairly dramatic with some of the lead cars having major problems. The other and very fast Porsche in the event had a major problem at the rear and had to be retired, the big Dodge Coupe developed an engine problem and missed a time trial, at the end of day 23 the car park resembled a Halfords Drive in Service on a Saturday morning. There were broken cars in all directions, luckily for me Molly was not one of them, but we had had a bit of drama on the way.

I had extended my mechanising abilities and changed Mollys points, she now flew along with no popping and banging. Remember in a previous blog i had said how to drive on gravel and look after your tyres, well I should have taken my own advice. We got a puncture in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully Jose and Maria stopped and lent us their ultra low jack. I had checked that my scissor jack fitted under Molly before we left the UK. What I hadn’t checked was if the jack fitted with a flat tyre and on sand :) Lesson learned.  Gianmaria and Rosella also stopped to lend a helping hand and moral support

Wheel changed and we headed for the next village. Here we found a garage but they had no power, but the guy said he could change our damaged tyre for the new one we carried by hand, using good old fashioned tyre levers. He spent about 40 min doing all this for us while all his mates came over to take photos.  He had to use our portable pump and puncture repair kit but fixed it all and off we went.

The first drama of the event.

The accommodation at Fish River Canyon was bizarre. The hotel was arrange as little lodges scattered around a huge rock outcrop in the middle of the desert.

To make it more strange there in the middle was a perfect natural grass crazy golf course. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to try and set a course record for most shots taken but would love to come back to this place.

Day 24 A huge driving day of 620km.  To give you a flavour of this rally and the roads the first part of today’s run is on an unmapped road across the desert to the Richtersveld National Park. This leads us to the South African border, easily crossed and then a long long drive to Clanwilliam. Thankfully all the repaired cars are back on the road and make it to Clanwilliam lodge. 

Along the route were endless roadworks. The South Africans seem to like closing one lane of great lengths of road. This means you have to wait about 10-20 min until its your turn to proceed. Then the locals try to drive at double the speed limit 0f 60km, if you don’t keep up you get overtaken on single lane roads and cut up.

These roadwork chicanes were some of the fastest ands hairiest driving we have done all rally. Quite good fun except for the speed trap on the last section, luckily they missed Molly but did catch some of the others.  

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 Some homes are not so fancy, but at least they have a pub. These is a town for the workers on the vineyards.

Over the past few days we have been lucky enough to stay in some great locations and have really good rooms. Clanwilliam Lodge was the end of the fairytale.

This was a very tired hotel, with some pretty poor rooms. Ours was OK except for being at the front in pole position for listening to the car alarms going off in the night and the hotel doors banging. Back to normality :)

We leave Clanwilliam quite quickly and set off on the last day.

Fred and Barney Flinstone invite us to their place

Day 10

We leave Agatha Coach House and continue driving through mile after mile of farmed forest offering some stunning scenery.

We arrive at the only time trial of the day, this is on a red dirt track through bits of forest and logging areas. I must confess not feeling 100% after all the excitement of yesterday, but we line up, the count down begins 5,4,3,2,1 and we are off against the clock. We come across some pedestrians and a local car driver, who was not impressed to see us belting along in the other direction but on his side of the road. We decide that all things considered we should back off and eventually cross the line outside of our allotted time. We now have 1 penalty point and are no longer in the joint lead. But if you read the results carefully and with a bit of party political type swing, we can still say we are in joint second place :)

We arrive at the recommended lunch stop to find that the Bel Air has hit a Guinea fowl and smashed its windscreen, the Guinea fowl was not so clever either.

Scott and Salome have had terrible luck with their car.  The master brake cylinder went going down the Swartzberg Pass not a good place to lose your brakes, they bought a brand new one, unpacked it, fitted it, and it didn’t work!

As they live in Johannesburg when the windscreen broke they were able to have a spare windscreen bought over to them, 5 hours later they were back in business.

Tonight we are staying at a place called Mapungubwe, I expect you have heard of it. It means ‘city of gold’. Hmmm!

Our route book says ‘ there is a serenity you cannot ignore’ I think whoever wrote this must have had extensive training as an estate agent. 

The serenity is absolute, mainly because we drive along a rough dirt track for 40 min to arrive at a group of round brick built, thatched buildings and no people, nothing. Its a bit like Fred and Barney’s houses in the Flintstones. You keep expecting Dino to coming jumping out at you. (hope you remember this cartoon ;) )

The route book again says ‘your lodge hosts will have details for you'. What hosts? It suddenly feels like "I am a rally driver, get me out of here”.

After a while we do find two ladies who helpfully advise that they don’t know anything about our supposed BBQ and sundowners experience.

One of the crews phones the organisers and things start to become a little clearer, basically don’t panic it will all be fine.

Our homes for the night are actually really comfortable, the outside shower is brilliant and at 7.00 the BBQ is in full swing and everyone is having fun.

The huts are set amongst some incredible rock formations which glow in the bright sunlight, maybe this is where the city of gold phrase comes from. Some of the rocks are balanced on top of each other as if they have carefully sculptured, but it's simply nature that has created these incredible balancing acts.

This location does turn out to be quite special, and one i would come to again preferably driving a 4X4.

All the cars are still going well and everyone is having a fantastic time, but I do wish the other crews would stop asking how Molly is doing with her new body design and such comments as ‘David try turning the steering wheel before the bend, not after it’ are not really appreciated it. We are still going and have had no mechanical issues at all, Go Go Molly.

Kruger National Park and Sabi Sands, the most amazing places.

Day 7

we leave The Royal Sawzi and drive through Swaziland in daylight, different place, much nicer.

We are heading for the Kruger National Park.

We now have a full compliment of rally cars again, unfortunately we lost a Buick. It developed a major engine problem and had to retire. The owner lives in South Africa. He got it shipped home and then rejoined the rally in a 1973 Merc, welcome back Udo.

All the other cars are performing pretty well. Molly is running very well but has had to have a major service ( by my standards ) I have tightened up the rear exhaust clamp and changed a petrol filter. I have managed this all on my own with no manual, no phoning Gantspeed and more impressively not hitting or cutting myself in the process.

The petrol here is what they call 95 octane, it what I call rubbish, still we are going along and having a ball.

Very excited about driving through Kruger National Park. You have to fill out all sorts of forms and promise not to hunt any of the animals.

Kruger is not the sort of park I am used to, can’t find any swings and the ice cream vans seem to have gone home. But what we do see is a baby elephant crossing the road closely followed by its Mum. 

Before we came here we looked up elephants and Kruger Park on Google/Utube. The video of the elephant rolling the car over in Kruger suddenly became very real. Mummy Elephent did not like the cars that close to her baby. There were only two cars, the guy in front and us. He slams his car into reverse and I try to find a similar gear, I know its in here somewhere but in my moment of terror I can’t find it.

Fortunately Mummy elephant seems to have proved her point, baby is safe and so are we as she carries on her way.

Think the guy in front may need to stop at the nearest building for a change of attire :)

Kruger is vast covering 2,000,000 hectares, you could spend a week driving round it (bit like an Ikea car park). We only have a couple of hours.

We need to press on to our next accommodation at a place called Sabi Sands.

Julie advises me its not far only about 40 km. What she doesn't know is it is along really sand covered safari park tracks.

Sabi Sands is a private game reserve with lodges scattered around it. To give you an idea of the scale of the lodges some of the owners are the Getty family and a chap called Sir R Branson.

As we enter Sabi Sands Molly gets thoroughly searched in case we are poachers and trying to sneak guns and such like into the reserve. Apparently they do this to all Porsche 356s which enter the reserve :) Whilst this search is going on one of the residents comes up to us and says that he has seen some crazy cars try to get to the lodges but nothing as crazy as us in Molly.

We have tried to photo the tracks we used, not sure they really show how ‘interesting ‘ the tracks were.

Molly proves them all wrong and we arrive just in time for late lunch.

The lodge we are staying in is called Leadwood.

I am not usually stuck for words but this place has done it. Simple stunning will do. 

As some of you will know we are not very lucky with our hotel rooms, we think we have cracked it with this lodge, settle down for an early night (5.30 start tomorrow) and just when you think you’re about to go to the land of nod a lion roars outside, and you know what you don’t care, this is Africa this is stunning.

In the morning we actual get up close and personal with said lion and his girlfriend. That will be day 8, where we have 5.30 start and one of the most amazing days we have ever had.

Next blog is all about the Big 5 + + +
Sorry for the lack of photos but we are in the middle of nowhere and its bait slow :)
Hopefully tomorrow the connection will be faster.

Zulu and nice police women

Day 6,

Today we drove from the Cathedral Peak Hotel high in the beautiful Drakensburg Mountains all the way to The Royal Swazi Sun Hotel.

Cathedral Peak Hotel has a world famous buffet which we just had to give a severe testing. The buffet won, but we did manage dishes from around the world.

Molly is begining to struggle with the extra weight this rally is inflicting on Julie and I.

The journey today was one of the hardest on the rally, we left at 8.12 our official start time and did not get to The Ryal Swazi until well into darkness.

During the drive we had another time trial, which Molly cleared again, still no penalty points and therefore still joint leaders ;)

From here we drove along some pretty rough gravel roads to Rorks Drift and the famous battle ground the film Zulu was based around. Phillip Young not only organises great rallies he is also an authority on this moment in history. He gave us a very informative talk the night before about this British disaster. This insight really helped understand what happened. We now need to re-watch Zulu, Michael Caine at his best and without any ‘doors to blow off”.

We then drove from South Africa into Swaziland. The border crossing is managed very well, we pay our 50 Rand road tax and off we go into country number 2.

Its a long drive to the hotel and even keeping Molly above the 110km speed limit we still arrive in the dark.

Driving in the dark in this area is quite exciting, some cars have lights, some have one light, some none at all, some are doing 30KPH and some way over 130KPH, there are street lights but they are a bit like the cars, some work most don’t, and all of this is on the motorway.

When we turn of the motorway it really livens up with crowds of people milling around, some on the pavement ( gravel track) some on the road. Now trying to be all PC :) its quite hard to see some of our Southern African friends at night. Even more so when they can’t believe what they see in the shape of Molly coming towards them and they stand in the road trying to get a better look. Some got a closer look than they probably wanted, but we all survive the ordeal in one piece.

We arrive at the Royal Swazi Hotel to find it is hosting The Swazi Open Golf Championship. It appears to be part of this Championship to drink huge amounts of alcohol and shout about every shot you hit at the top of your voice. As you may be able to tell we are really loving this place, especially when we find our room is over the air conditioning plant for the whole hotel. How do we manage it.

Swaziland itself is really lovely. It appears to be a proud prosperous nation with fantastic scenery a bit like West Sussex with mountains.

They also have lovely policemen, especially the two who pulled us is over. When this happens your brain goes into overdrive trying to remember the speeds you have been doing through the towns and villages.

These two police men turn out to be women, one of which is an Indian lady with a mixture of Indian and hard South African accent.

We got the usual questions - name? where you from? ( so far so good ) where you going, I don’t know so Julie helps out, and then the killer question ‘ are you in a race or rally ??’

'No certainly not' we reply again so far so good. Then it all goes a bit pear shaped when 4 other rally cars pull up alongside ‘to help out’ They see that things are not going too well and drive off again. Thanks guys :) Julie and I carry on chatting with our new official friends and tell them how wonderful the country is and how pretty they look in their uniforms and how shiny their guns are. Think it worked OK, they took a photos of themselves with Molly and let us go. Phew !!

some photos of Molly Porsche in action

These are some of the great photos taken by Gerard Brown,  bit biased towards Molly.
 For for more amazing photos of the other teams and the Southern Africa country side please go to
http://gerardbrown.photoshelter.com/gallery-collection/Classic-Safari-2014/C0000JorgUlfukko

I know this is a Jaguar, her name is Dowager Number 15, driven by Greg and Jen.

 They keep overtaking us :)

This shot by Gerard gives you an idea of what the mountain pass was like, note the safety barriers and the sheer drop :)

Go Molly Porsche :)

Big driving day and WTBHWT !!!!Porsche 356

day 4

Today is a monster driving day covering some 630 km from Cradock to The Golden Gate Highlands National Park. To start the day we have two time trials. The first one on quite nice loose gravel we have to cover 9km in 8 minutes  and we do pretty well clearing the stage. The only slight delay being a cow trying to cross the same piece of road as us.

I think our wing mirror clipped the ring in its nose :)

The second stage was on much rougher ground with a couple of railway crossings thrown in for good measure and we have to cover 11km in 9 minutes.

Because we had done so well in the first one and Molly was going well we (well mainly me) got a bit over enthusiastic in a couple of places.

One of them was at a level crossing that Julie mentioned to me in a sort of shrill screaming type of instruction, we flew over it, having failed to brake, luckily the 09.25 from Cradock was running late and no damage was done.

Thinking our luck was in we pushed on a little harder, suddenly we are hurtling down a very rough piece of road with a sharp left hand bend, road cambering the wrong way and quite a big drop on MY side. Brakes fully applied but not having a lot of effect, only thing to do is try and take the corner. Julie is in shrill instruction mode again at this point and I am trying to remember what my rally driving instructor has told me to do when imminent disaster is about to strike.

Now did he say don’t brake or don’t accelerate. Not terribly sure what I did it all happened in slow motion, Molly going completely sideways, ditch fast approaching and me telling Julie its all her fault because we have too much luggage in the back and its making the car spin.

Next thing Molly was back on the track, going in the right direction and all was well with the world.

We carried on and cleared the stage, but strangely in complete silence.

After all this we get back onto the tarmac road and settle down to doing 400 + km.

The scenery en route is simply stunning. We are now staying in the Highlands National Park. We have a warning on the patio doors to keep them closed otherwise the room will be raided by baboons. Doors are firmly closed, you can only have so much excitement in one day.

Fast forward about 10 hours to day 5 morning at about 7.00. WTBHWT (this is me trying to do mobile phone talk) it stands for What The Bloody Hell Was That.

Our patio doors are trying to be forced open and there is someone trying to bash through the tin roof. Oh no its a Baboon attack. They are trying to get into every room swinging from balcony to balcony checking the doors in a forceful way. The thought does cross my mind as to what would have happened if he had got in.

Those who know us well will know about Julie’s ‘grumps’ in the morning. The confrontation would have been interesting.

Its now 8.00 and they are still charging around on the roof and making a terrible but exciting noise.

Now did i close the car windows ????

Last night we had the results of the stages. We did not win either of them but we did come 5 in the first stage and received no penalties for either which means we are officially in first place :) along with about 15 other crews :(

But this is not a competitive rally so we can’t publish the times but to give you a hint of how uncompetitive it is on the first stage one car was over 1.5 minutes faster than us and on the second stage another car (think it was a porsche :) ) was 2 minutes quicker than us. That’s 11 km on terrible roads in around 7.5 minutes amazing driving and congratulations to the navigator for not getting out half way.

Some information on yesterdays stunning pass

Our room, you can see the Tin bath hanging on the wall :)

And were are off

At 8.12 this morning we started our great adventure. We left the Cape Grace Hotel and headed off along the cost road towards Stellenbosch.
We are a little bleary eyed due to lack of sleep. As mentioned in the last post we had a really nice room overlooking the joyfully coloured little fishing boats. What we did not know was at 4.00 am they decide to move around. One of them in particular wanted to be a formula 1 jet ski boat and had taken his exhaust system off. It's quite amazing how much echo there is around a bay at that time of day or was it night.
This is the view from the quiet side of the hotel) We really slum it on these rallies:)

Anyway Philip Young flags us off with a steel band playing and much hooting, hope it woke the guys up in the fishing boat.
The roads are very good and the traffic quite light compared to SE England. The scenery even just leaving Cape Town is stunning. It's not long before the rally route leaves the main roads and heads cross country on gravel roads.
These are really nice well graded gravel roads and they take you to places you would never normally see on the tourist route. It also gives you a chance to put your foot down with no danger of speed cameras. Speed cameras in South Africa have been sub contracted out by the police and the company running and enforcing them does not play fair so you have to be extra careful.
We have started our animal count, not quite in the big 5 league yet but we are quite proud to have seen two mongoose, an ostrich and a rather large snake.
They didn't spot me hiding behind this tree.

In the afternoon we have our first bit of competition. We have to cover 10 kms in 9 minutes on a hilly gravel road. If you do under the 9 minutes you technically do what is know as 'clear the stage' I only usually manage to do that when i sing, but today with Julie and Mollys help we 'cleared the stage' Come on Molly.
I forgot to mention the scrutineering, Molly passed with flying colours. The 'drink' we bought for the scrutineer was a bit of a waste of time, he turned out not to be the scrutineer at all. Think he could have mentioned that before the 4th whisky.
It looks like all the cars have finished the first day safe and sound, bit dusty and tired but thoroughly enjoying South Africa.

Arrived in Cape Town, now where is Molly ?

Well we arrived in Cape Town yesterday (Tuesday) in the pouring rain.
How many times does it happen when one of the locals comes over and cheerfully  says ' you should have been here yesterday it was a beautiful day'. I find these comments really help dry your clothes and shoes out a lot quicker.
However today is that beautiful day. 
We have met a couple of the other competitors and some old friends. Always helps to settle the nerves.
Next thing on the agenda is to find Molly. She is somewhere in the container port.
Tomorrow assuming Molly is all ok we have to have a briefing ( odd term as they seem to go on for hours and involve a lunch) and then scrutineering. Now, we are hoping for a slightly better result than the scrutineering in South America where we failed. It's looking more promising because the South America engineer who walked up to Molly muttering ' don't like Porsches' is not here, and we have already had a little chat with this years 'highly trained' engineer in the bar.
We will wait and see.
We are staying at the Cape Grace hotel and very good it is to. Even managed to get a room NOT next door to the lift, disco, air conditioning plant or above the kitchen. Must be some mistake and no doubt we will be moved on in due course:)
We have just been advised that we can collect our cars, its only 10 min drive away. We all pile in to two mini buses and set off at 3.00pm. 45 minutes later the two mini bus drivers decide it would have been better to start the journey with an address or an approximate idea of the location of the cars. To add to the excitement the secure storage area closes at 4.00pm and is closed rte following day meaning that we would all miss the start of the rally. No pressure.
After many phone calls and the use of Julies GPS system we find the cars. There was no need for panic we had a full 5 minutes to spare.
One poor chap rather wished he had not found his 

Only joking.

The cars were all fine and we were soon finding our way back to the hotel, which was surprisingly only 10 minutes away.

Arriving back at the hotel we have to sign on and start looking at the route book, there is only one true professional way to do this, as shown below.

Next scrutineering!!!

Getting ready for the Classic Safari Challenge or is it Survival Challenge?

David, Julie and Molly are off on another adventure.
Next Monday we fly to Cape Town, South Africa, and meet up with Molly, our 356A Porsche. It will be good to be reunited. We have only seen her for a few days since we left her in Cape Horn, South America, and the few days we did see her she got a bit over excited and dropped oil all over the drive :)
Gantspeed had a word told her to grow up and behave. Which she did. I thought it was a bit harsh to then put her in a big black box for 4 weeks and send her away. Just hope she does not throw a paddy when we meet up.
This adventure is called the Classic Safari Challenge. It is run by The Endurance Rally Association (ERA) and is approx. 8000 km over 26 days, taking in a huge amount of Southern Africa.
There are 28 competitors. These are broken down into classes with ages ranging from 1928 up to 2010. These are the car ages ( I think).
Some of the competitors we have rallied with before and we are looking forward to meeting up with them again.
We are about to start packing for the trip.
We have compiled a bit of a packing list. Clothes, shoes, anti everything sprays. Then I decided to  do a bit of research on this Internety thing to check what else we may need.
I am not terribly sure that it was such a good idea. While I was searching for 'rally drivers survival techniques' I came across an article about something called the rule of 3. It goes a bit like this,

The Rule of Threes
The rule of threes is only approximate (and can change a bit under certain particular conditions), but it will give you a good general idea of what is important. In its most basic form, which covers most circumstances, it goes like this:

1. You can survive for three hours without enough warmth.
2. You can survive for three days without water.
3. You can survive for three weeks without food.
4. Sometimes people add a few more "threes" to the list, here is an extended version
5. You can survive for three seconds without blood.
6. You can survive for three minutes without air.
7. You can survive for three months without human company.

Another rule sometimes added to the front of the list is "You can survive for three seconds without thinking", meaning that it only takes three seconds (or less) to do something dumb enough that it could kill you, if you are not thinking straight.
All very useful, but it excludes the real essentials of  lasting 30 seconds without checking your Facebook status, checking the football scores and checking to see if you have won £3000 on your
accident claim you never knew you had.
Oh yes!  and checking that you have anti charging angry animal spray.