Away At The Races - Part II

Race Day and Drive Home

Craig had a Cunning Plan. “Mate, instead of racing with the Sports Cars guys, why don’t we move our entries across to the LUK Coastal Challenge? Instead of trundling around toward the back of the field, our lap times will have us in the thick of it!” It seems unbelievable to me now that I needed persuading, but I did. The organisers were happy for me to shift my entry across, so I did and then went out to do timed quali.

Timed quali was a bit frantic, as instead of having a leisurely start to the day I had to suit up and head out in double quick time. There was a fair amount of traffic, which meant that I struggled to find a clear lap and I ended up recording a time in the 1:19’s. I had a self-imposed target of 1:18’s, based on what people had done with similar cars, so 1:19 was slightly disappointing but not too awful. I was gridded in 20^th place for the first heat, in a field of about 35 cars.

The first heat was called, I leapt into Blossom, turned the key and found no co-operation from the starter motor. Craig helped identify the errant electrical connection, and we had life. These things always happen when there’s time pressure, as if the excitement of an imminent race was not enough.

The first lap or so were frantic and, mindful of the fact that I had to drive further than usual to get home, I surrendered a place or two in the first lap until everything settled down. First order of business was fending off Barry Kapelus in a Ford Kent powered Mini. Once I had some space on him, I set about catching Ian Thomson in an Opel Rekord. That took me a lap or two; Ian clearly knows his way around Aldo Scribante because when I thought that I would outbrake him into the hairpin at the end of the straight he was having none of that, and stayed off the brakes long enough to leave me with nowhere to go.

By getting good drive out of the final turn, I got past Ian on the main straight and then headed off after Herman Fourie (in a Toyota powered Lotus 7 replica) and Anton Ehlers in a very pretty, bright yellow Escort Mk I. There was a brief moment when I thought that I was going to find a way past both of them going into turn 1, but then Herman moved across and I had to come off the power and wait a bit longer, eventually overtaking Herman after I got better drive off the last corner. And a lap later I managed to narrowly outrun Anton, overtaking him between the last corner and the chequered and beating him by 25 thousandths of a second. At the time I hoped that he had not placed his transponder at his front axle, because mine was on my rollbar, and the difference would have been enough to change the result – by my reckoning my transponder was about a metre ahead of Anton’s when we crossed the line.

The second heat saw me starting where I finished the first, in 11^th place. Another slightly timid start saw me chasing and passing Steven Murphy’s red Alfa Giulia. After that there was nobody close enough for me to chase after, but I had my mirrors full, first of Steven’s car, and later of Johan van der Westhuizen’s equally red Ford Interceptor. When we caught up with the backmarkers my usual relaxed and patient overtaking gave way to the desire to place as many obstacles between me and the chasing pack as I could, so I fairly carved through the back of the field, passing three cars in the last two corners. I gained another place when Patrick Hanly went off on the last lap.

Before the second heat, I saw that there was petrol around the flange where the fuel pipe returns fuel to the fuel tank. Between that and the fact that I had enjoyed a fantastic two heats, I did not want to push my luck and do the one hour race. I packed everything up and headed back home for a shower, and then returned to watch the end of the one hour race.

For the drive back to the circuit I borrowed my mother in law’s VW Polo. Now, this is a car that I genuinely like, but after two days in Blossom a VW Polo feels like driving a bouncy castle. When I got back to Aldo Scribante, the first good thing that I noticed was that Craig was not at his pit. That meant that he was still racing. Phew!

Better yet, Craig was out there punching way above his weight. The announcer had him in fourth place, which was slightly optimistic. Craig finished in fifth, ahead of some much “faster” machinery and also won the index of performance, which is a measure of consistency.

Lying in bed on Saturday night I pondered the fuel leak. As the fuel pipes from the tank had been re-welded recently, and the welds looked excellent and deep, I decided that the welds were not at fault, but that the clamp on the fuel hose which meets the pipe for fuel return must not be 100% tight. That would explain the seep of fuel which appeared to run down the pipe and onto the flange. With that sorted (apparently) I slept.

At first light I was up and at the supposedly offending hose clamp. As soon as screwdriver met hose clamp there was a muted click as what had been a tiny crack became a very large crack, just above the weld. And I was about to depart for Cape Town. Swearing didn’t fix the problem. And even my fierce, laser-beam-eyed staring at the pipe didn’t fix it. So I did what anybody would do in the situation – I broke it good and proper.

Then I channelled the spirit of McGyver. First things first, I broke out a stick of chewing gum. While I was chewing, I blocked off the fuel return flexible hose so that the fuel returned into the fuel overflow on the filler neck. Once that was done, I took the chewing gum and used that to block the small hole on top of the flange. Minty! And good to go. Chewing gum is supposed to be good to fix fuel leaks. It may be that the brand I was using was not suitable, but my experience is that chewing gum does not fix fuel leaks. I hear good things about soap though...

As I was hitting the road some distance towards Cape Town, i.e., ahead of the rest of the convoy, I trickled along the freeway, slow as a slug, to let Craig and Ant catch up with me. The weather was mild, but the wind was absolutely howling so when Craig came past me, and I upped my speed, I soon began to regret my decision to drive in beanie and flying goggles.

I further reviewed my decision when, some two hundred metres ahead of me, a large piece of orange detached itself from Craig’s car. I watched in awe and expletives as the bonnet flew high up into the air, before the wind blew it into a field. We stopped to play ‘hunt the bonnet’, and Craig dabbed at the wound on his chin. The bonnet had smacked his crash helmet back with such force that the skin on his chin had split and was bleeding.

With the bonnet retrieved (and me wearing my crash helmet) we set off once more. Driving along the toll section near Storms River, Blossom coughed and then picked up the revs. Hmmmm. The same thing happened again once or twice, and usually just as I was overtaking something. Each time I noticed that the temperature gauge dropped. Clearly, all the sparks were falling out, however briefly.

Twice we ground to a halt, and then re-started. “Now listen mate,” Craig admonished, “if you could just break it and leave it broken I might have a chance of fixing it for you!”

After a number of exciting moments, with coughs and splutters seemingly every time I pulled out to overtake something, Blossom decided that enough was in fact enough, stopped and stayed stopped. Within seconds Craig had identified the offending section of wiring, found the problem and fixed it and we were off again.

In Knysna we stopped for brekkie, where we met up with some of the other Capetonians who were making their way homewards, and Francis Cusens, organiser of the Knysna Hillclimb. After breakfast at the Knysna Quays, we all trooped off to the site of the hillclimb start to salivate at the prospect of some more motorsport adventuring.

The rest of the homeward drive was a breeze. Craig didn’t throw any more pieces of his car at me, and no more sparks fell out of my car. Neither of us ran out of fuel. With the sun setting, Craig and I stopped to refuel at the N1 One Stop opposite where our adventure had begun three days and around 1,500km previously.

Cups of coffee restored some warmth, before a couple of last minute photographs in the car park, and off to our respective homes. I parked Blossom, unpacked, showered and went to bed. After 12 hours on the road – including stops – I could still hear the noise of wind rushing past my crash helmet. And then I fell asleep.

Video footage of heat 1

Video footage of heat 2

(Picture: John Grosse)

Away At The Races - Part I

Aug 12 & 13: Drive to PE and Practice

The night before a race meeting I do not sleep well. There’s too much excitement and fizzing in my blood for sleep to really happen. I usually have everything ready for the next day, so that all I need to do when the alarm goes off is to bounce out of bed and go. With the mouthwatering prospect of a long distance drive followed by two days at the race track and a drive back, sleep was never a real proposition. And 750km in winter, in a car with no heater, windscreen, roof, windows or carpets really is a long drive. No wonder I was looking forward to it so much. With my alarm set for 5:30, I woke up at 5:00.

Three vehicles were to drive up in convoy: me in Blossom, Craig Harper in his Harper Type 5 and Anthony Cocks (with his son and his son’s girlfriend) in a Land Rover Discovery. Obviously Ant was driving with us so that Craig or I could tow the Landy if it needed help. We met up at the Winelands One Stop on the N1 at 6.30.

“Confession time!” I owned up. “I couldn’t sleep this morning; I’ve been awake since 5:00.”

“Amateur!” Declared Craig, “I was up at 4:30 and doing crossword puzzles until it was time to go.”

As we drove into Paarl the mild early spring morning gave way to coolness. I’d been expecting a chilly start, and mindful of the notion that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, I was wearing my flameproof long johns underneath my jeans for warmth, I had a t-shirt, a long-sleeve t-shirt, a thick fleecy sweatshirt, a scarf, a wind and water proof jacket with its own zipped-in fleecy jacket, gloves and my full-face crash hat to keep my head warm.

Driving through the Huguenot tunnel I could hear Craig making the most of the echo by winding his car’s engine up to the red line. “How very childish!”, I thought, slowing down and then grinning like a maniac as I did exactly the same thing. Although our cars are very different, they are powered by very similar Toyota 20-valve motors, with the rev limit set well north of 8,000 rpm and they sound wonderful at high revs. When we emerged from the tunnel, first light was gaining the upper hand over darkness, and the temperature was noticeably colder than it had been on the other side of the tunnel.

Driving through Worcester, Ant pulled up alongside me and Craig, wound down his window, leaned out and said “Lads, apparently it’s two degrees!”

“I know!”, I yelled back, “I can feel both of them!”

Over breakfast at Rooiberg, Ant commented on how cold it had been. “Did you boys notice there was frost on the ground?”

“Notice it?” asked Craig, “Anthony, you guys are mere observers. We on the other hand are active participants in the cold!”

After breakfast the sun had come up and we headed out in a much milder morning, only to stop after a few kilometres when I saw Blossom’s alternator light blinking. An inspection of all the alternator connections showed no loose wires, so on we went. On the outskirts of Sedgefield I saw a gathering of traffic cops, and I had no doubt that they would stop us, which they did. “My” cop asked to see my driver’s licence, checked that the car’s licence disc was in date and then went across to where her colleague was grilling Craig. Craig’s interview was a bit stickier than mine as his car’s disc was out of date, and his car is registered in Botswana, just to keep things interesting. But Craig is a charming fellow and soon had the Law seeing things his way.

“I can’t believe it!”, Said my traffic cop, referring to Blossom, “This one’s registered too!”

The cops were intrigued by our cars, and the notion that any sane person (well, how were they to know?) would drive such cars all the way from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. Craig received an unasked for design critique of his car: “You can take the whole car...keep it...just leave me the wheels!”

Neither cop really believed that Craig and I had been behaving on our trip (although we had) and waved us off with a charming warning: “Drive slowly gentlemen...we can’t cats you, but we jus’ suit you!” This last was accompanied by mimicking a pump action shotgun. It’s exchanges like this that really cement my respect for the ladies and gentlemen of the law.

Lunch at Knysna took a little longer than it should have, when Blossom refused to start. Craig diagnosed that there was a spark leak in the power supply to the fuel pumps, and we rigged up an emergency electrical feed to continue the journey. That would have been the cause of the flickering alternator light, as the pumps’ power supply shorted out.

In the late afternoon Craig disappeared from my mirrors, so I slowed to let him catch up. And then I stopped to wait for him. And then I called him. He had run out of fuel, so I turned round and stopped to refill his car from my jerry can. The rest of our journey was uneventful. Craig and Ant drove on to camp at Aldo Scribante circuit, and I made my way to my brother in law’s house on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, where I would be based for the next two days.

After spending most of the day wedged tight in a narrow bucket seat with almost zero padding (there is a very small piece of 5mm thick foam rubber behind the driver’s head) I felt as though I had been wrestling a grumpy bear. After a beer, a shower and supper and yes, thank you another beer would be lovely, I got an early night’s sleep.

Before heading out to Aldo Scribante I replaced the emergency power feed to the fuel pumps with a more permanent solution. By the time I arrived at the race track. it would not be accurate to say that I had some feelings of trepidation. It would be accurate to say that I had many feelings of trepidation. I checked Blossom’s oil level, got changed into my race gear and headed out into a personal sense of utter confusion.

I have driven Killarney race track, my home track, many times. I’ve ridden it on a motorcycle. Hell, I’ve even ridden in on a bicycle. Other than that I’ve done a track day at Wakefield Park in Australia and that’s it. So I’d had no experience in learning a new race track. And Aldo Scribante is a tricky little bugger. For a start the surface is very grippy, so you can brake much later than my brain told me was possible. So you come to a corner, scrub off more speed than you need to and then accelerate into the corner. And that is when you discover that a lot of the corners tighten up partway through and that you are now going faster than you ought to be. On top of that the circuit goes through dips so that the topography hides the track from you.

For the first few laps I felt like little old ladies on bicycles would be going past me. Everything else certainly was. Gradually things began to flow, I began to enjoy myself, and I began to enjoy, no, make that love the track. It’s like the love child of a roller coaster and a fire cracker.

The grippy surface means that braking is late and dramatic. At the end of the straight, when you hit the brakes you must make sure that your eyes are clenched half closed in the manner of Clint Eastwood squinting at a bad guy. If you fail to do this there is an awful mess inside your crash helmet as deceleration sucks your eyeballs out of their sockets and they bounce on the inside of your visor. The esses are fast and furious and there is more of that teasing going on, because if you carry full speed through the first ess, you will not be able to make the second ess.

Then there is a short straight and the first dip, with a sweeping right hander on the crown as you exit. Get that right and you are whizzing along to a hairpin bend and then dropping into the second dip. There is a left hander at the bottom of the dip which your balls know can be taken flat, but your brain insists that you lift for. Then there is a long sweeping left hander before the sharp bend onto the straight.

And because the track is so abrasive, which is what makes it so grippy on the line, off the line there are more abandoned marbles than you will find in a looney bin, so the transition from grippy to slippy is fast.

By early afternoon I was able to stay in just about in touch with Hennie Trollip (Lotus Seven replica) who is a seasoned campaigner at Aldo Scribante, so I declared myself happy and toddled off back to my lodgings. The exhaust support had snapped, so I made a plan to stop at an exhaust shop on the way home and get that fixed.

Climbing a short hill on the N2, driving in the right hand lane, Blossom decided that she did not want to go any further. As soon as I felt the engine die I pulled off the road as best I could. There was too much traffic for me to be able to get to the left hand side of the road, so I coasted up close to the Armco on the right and ground to a halt.

That was when my wife called. And wanted to know why I sounded tense, distracted and uncommunicative. Oddly enough, the worry of impending flattening by goods lorry always makes me react that way!

There was a repeat of the fuel pump spark leaking. I could tell because when I tugged on the wire, it came out, with sparks still leaking out of it. Another get-me-home fix was made, and in less than 10 minutes after I stopped, I was under way again. This time when I made a permanent fix, something I was becoming rather good at, I made darn’ sure that the propshaft and the power lead were never going to renew their acquaintance, and weight of cable ties be damned!