The Mission


The Peking to Paris Rally is a recreation of the 1907 challenge issued by Le Matin, "Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Peking to Paris by automobile?"
The 2016 version will follow a route of 13,695 Km (8,510 miles) and take 35 days. We are travelling in Rhubarb and Custard, a 1936 Buick. We know nothing about cars or rallying.

Saturday 18 April 2015

Flying Scotsman Day 1


We were so busy yesterday that there was no time to post a blog entry about day 1 of the Rally.

We ended the day 57th, which wasn't so bad and we should have been 47th because we got a 10 min penalty which we don't think was correct.  In fact we could have been 37th but we got a 10 min penalty that we could easily have avoided.  However that's what this trip is all about - learning by mistakes.

We have I think made every mistake possible.  We've gone left when the instructions said to go right. We've said go left when we meant to say go right. We've said keep it to your left when we meant keep it to your right.  We've said, "mind the back of that Bentley as you are reversing....oh shit (well I expect the insurance will pay)".  We have had a gold star for our Regularity tests. And we have the maximum penalty.Although we had our problems lots of people didn't make it at all.

The day finished (after exchange of insurance data with the dented Dutch Bentley owner) with having the brakes fixed and an attempt to fix our Brantz tripmeter, which wasn't showing interval distances. This took three hours and in the end it was realised that we could just use the Brantz a different way and achieve the same result. By this time dinner had finished and we still had to go over the maps.

Scenery was to die for and sunny all the way. What a great country Britain is.

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