Just needed to take the race car out to calibrate the trip-meter, so we headed out on Al Qudra Road. After a couple of attempts we still needed to run another km, which took us past a parked police car - who promptly nicked us for driving a rally car on the road. So I followed him to Barsha Police Station, kicking out Sheila an route to pick up all the relevant documents and follow us there.
Finally they decided that the car must be impounded till Sunday, which would be a total disaster! At this point I realised industrial-strength wasta was called for. I asked Ronan Morgan if he could get Mohd Bin Sulayem on the case, and late yesterday evening he called back to tell me 'the fix was in'. After a nervous few hours we picked the car up this morning, took it to Abu Dhabi and breezed through scrutineering. I owe Ronan and Mohd big-time.
Not so lucky were our friends Matar Al Mansoori (wrong restrictor size) and Dave Mabbs (wrong restrictor, plus they need to stop oil coming out of the front diff and the timing cover). Sounds like they'll be working late tonight. 40 vehicles were still awaited from a vessel docking at 6am this morning, so that's 40 more teams who are worse off than us.
For once, and to our great surprise, we're ahead of the game.
These are the voyages of the starship 'Newtrix'. Its multi-year mission: to compete in any rally within striking distance of Dubai, and to acquire shiny trophies. To boldly go wherever this quest may take us, as long as we can be home in time for tea.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
Good news, bad news
Oh dear, how fickle are the media! One day you're the Next Big Thing, the next you're history. Despite the best efforts of the lovely Rebekka, my friend at GTV, her head office didn't green-light the plan - so the documentary is off. But we did get a few column-inches in 'Sport 360', with the promise of more to come in 'Adventure' magazine.
TNT have managed to let me down totally with shipping the drag-link, which languished in Oz for a week after they collected it, and is now due in Dubai on Sunday - the day we start the rally. So if anyone knows someone coming down to the bivvy, maybe we can find a way for it to catch up with us. At least I have a spare standard one in my sale-or-return kit, courtesy of Arabian Automobiles (Nissan distributor).
Today we completed documentation and took posession of the new improved ERTF GPS with integral Sentinel function, and its asssociated new cables and accessories. Only after plumbing in all the new cables did we discover that the French had cunningly provided a male connector on the new red button, to connect with the new male connector on the power cable. Now, call us old fashioned, but here at NewTrix Racing we don't hold with male-to-male connectivity, so Rick cut off their appendages (yes, sliced them through!) and used a bit of choc-bloc instead. So all is sorted, although the GPS may never be able to have children now.
This afternoon we shall do the stickers, and take the Beast up the road to calibrate the tripmeter. (Actually, that's just an excuse for a blat.)
The rally route, unsurprisingly, is very similar to last year's, and the prologue is once again on that uninspiring piece of reclaimed land beside Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi, garnished with building rubble and broken bits of rebar. Oh joy.
More soon.
TNT have managed to let me down totally with shipping the drag-link, which languished in Oz for a week after they collected it, and is now due in Dubai on Sunday - the day we start the rally. So if anyone knows someone coming down to the bivvy, maybe we can find a way for it to catch up with us. At least I have a spare standard one in my sale-or-return kit, courtesy of Arabian Automobiles (Nissan distributor).
Today we completed documentation and took posession of the new improved ERTF GPS with integral Sentinel function, and its asssociated new cables and accessories. Only after plumbing in all the new cables did we discover that the French had cunningly provided a male connector on the new red button, to connect with the new male connector on the power cable. Now, call us old fashioned, but here at NewTrix Racing we don't hold with male-to-male connectivity, so Rick cut off their appendages (yes, sliced them through!) and used a bit of choc-bloc instead. So all is sorted, although the GPS may never be able to have children now.
This afternoon we shall do the stickers, and take the Beast up the road to calibrate the tripmeter. (Actually, that's just an excuse for a blat.)
The rally route, unsurprisingly, is very similar to last year's, and the prologue is once again on that uninspiring piece of reclaimed land beside Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi, garnished with building rubble and broken bits of rebar. Oh joy.
More soon.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Darlings of the Media
After having done precisely zero PR for the rally, we got a phone call from the nice man at Sport 360, our local sports daily. After a telephone interview at the weekend, a photographer duly arrived on Sunday afternoon to take some pictures of us and The Beast. We had to dress up in our rally gear and mime some fairly unconvincing rallying around Arabian Ranches, and allegedly this will result in our appearance in a pull-out DC supplement on Wednesday. Watch this space.
Today, German TV approached us to do a special on the only husband-and-wife team in the DC. They plan to do three video sessions, one pre-start, one at the start and another at the finish. This all sounds rather exciting, although I did have to promise to abstain from John Cleese impressions and avoid any mention of the 1966 World Cup for the duration of the event. When this 30-minute feature might air is as yet unknown, but we have been promised a copy of the finished piece.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Richard Bailey’s boss reneged on his promise to allow him time off for the DC and sent him to Norway instead (boo, hiss!). This is as much a blow for him as it is for us. However, under the pretext of recruiting for our Abu Dhabi F1 marshalling team, we met up with Ian Simpson. I promised him a week filled with adventure, excitement, travel to faraway places with strange-sounding names, and all the sand he could eat. He was easily seduced by my persuasive lies, and in a moment of madness signed up for a week of unspeakable hardship in the service of NewTrix Racing. So we now have a man whose CV highlights include ‘knowing one end of a spanner from the other’ and ‘being very good with tiewraps’. We’re going to try and build on this, and if he shows promise, we’ll introduce him to gaffer tape and binding wire. He will be driving the heavily laden VW Transporter from bivvy to Service Point and back every day, an essential if unglamorous role, and we extend the warm and sweaty hand of welcome to our new team member.
On the car front, we eagerly await the arrival of a heavy-duty sway-bar from Australia, having bent two standard ones into interesting banana shapes in the past. Our new rattle gun has arrived, to replace the old one. This has sadly endured greatly in the service of NewTrix, being run into by the dastardly French (boo, hiss!) and then destroying itself in an ultimately futile bid for freedom from its captivity in the back of the race car. I have managed to track down the correct GM belt tensioner to have as a spare, and hopefully a small pile of sale-or-return spares are waiting for me courtesy of the nice man at Arabian Automobiles, the Nissan dealer. The (Chinese) air-horns I installed before the UAQ solo race have died already, so I’ve replaced them with a pair of (Japanese) conventional horns which are equally deafening and seemingly less fragile. (Just don't get me started about the Chinese....)
The annual MOT (or should I say TRA) was also due this week, which meant Sunday was spent surviving the double whammy of a check-over by Rob Bryan at Bin Sulayem Performance, and then by the ‘experts’ at the Tasjeel. The first was no problem, the second – well, let’s just say I eventually got through without completely losing my rag.
That pretty much brings you, dear reader, up to date with the doings at NewTrix. The Phantom Blogger has once again been recruited to spread glad tidings of great joy (or not, as the case may be) on a daily basis during the event, so be sure to keep this blog on your watch list. Why not ‘Join this site’ as a follower? It doesn’t mean you’ll be deluged with spam, only that you’ll get an alert when a post is added to the blog. (Go on, you know you want to…)
Oh, and we're number 223 this year out of a total of 44 entries in the auto class. Go to www.abudhabidesertchallenge.com and you should be able to follow us through their live tracking - Inshallah.
Today, German TV approached us to do a special on the only husband-and-wife team in the DC. They plan to do three video sessions, one pre-start, one at the start and another at the finish. This all sounds rather exciting, although I did have to promise to abstain from John Cleese impressions and avoid any mention of the 1966 World Cup for the duration of the event. When this 30-minute feature might air is as yet unknown, but we have been promised a copy of the finished piece.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Richard Bailey’s boss reneged on his promise to allow him time off for the DC and sent him to Norway instead (boo, hiss!). This is as much a blow for him as it is for us. However, under the pretext of recruiting for our Abu Dhabi F1 marshalling team, we met up with Ian Simpson. I promised him a week filled with adventure, excitement, travel to faraway places with strange-sounding names, and all the sand he could eat. He was easily seduced by my persuasive lies, and in a moment of madness signed up for a week of unspeakable hardship in the service of NewTrix Racing. So we now have a man whose CV highlights include ‘knowing one end of a spanner from the other’ and ‘being very good with tiewraps’. We’re going to try and build on this, and if he shows promise, we’ll introduce him to gaffer tape and binding wire. He will be driving the heavily laden VW Transporter from bivvy to Service Point and back every day, an essential if unglamorous role, and we extend the warm and sweaty hand of welcome to our new team member.
On the car front, we eagerly await the arrival of a heavy-duty sway-bar from Australia, having bent two standard ones into interesting banana shapes in the past. Our new rattle gun has arrived, to replace the old one. This has sadly endured greatly in the service of NewTrix, being run into by the dastardly French (boo, hiss!) and then destroying itself in an ultimately futile bid for freedom from its captivity in the back of the race car. I have managed to track down the correct GM belt tensioner to have as a spare, and hopefully a small pile of sale-or-return spares are waiting for me courtesy of the nice man at Arabian Automobiles, the Nissan dealer. The (Chinese) air-horns I installed before the UAQ solo race have died already, so I’ve replaced them with a pair of (Japanese) conventional horns which are equally deafening and seemingly less fragile. (Just don't get me started about the Chinese....)
The annual MOT (or should I say TRA) was also due this week, which meant Sunday was spent surviving the double whammy of a check-over by Rob Bryan at Bin Sulayem Performance, and then by the ‘experts’ at the Tasjeel. The first was no problem, the second – well, let’s just say I eventually got through without completely losing my rag.
That pretty much brings you, dear reader, up to date with the doings at NewTrix. The Phantom Blogger has once again been recruited to spread glad tidings of great joy (or not, as the case may be) on a daily basis during the event, so be sure to keep this blog on your watch list. Why not ‘Join this site’ as a follower? It doesn’t mean you’ll be deluged with spam, only that you’ll get an alert when a post is added to the blog. (Go on, you know you want to…)
Oh, and we're number 223 this year out of a total of 44 entries in the auto class. Go to www.abudhabidesertchallenge.com and you should be able to follow us through their live tracking - Inshallah.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Don’t they have weather in China?
As the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge approaches, we at NewTrix Racing desperately try to prepare ourselves for the major event of the year. Our joy at having Richard Bailey on the team was sadly short-lived – his boss reneged on his agreement to allow Richard to take time off for the DC and sent him to Norway instead. Fortunately, we have found an excellent replacement in Ian Simpson. He naively attended a meeting which Sheila arranged on the pretext of recruiting marshals for the Abu Dhabi F1, and I shanghaied him into our team for the DC with promises of travel, adventure, excitement and sand. But mostly sand.
One of the prep jobs is to sort out the Eezi-Up awning. Of course it’s not a real Eezi-Up because they cost an arm and a leg, although they do last for ever because they are made of Real Metal. This is a Carrefour special, one of two which we bought about three years ago, and it’s made in China. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about its build quality, China being the undisputed world leader in the manufacture of tat.
However, it has survived three outings at the DC, due to an ongoing programme of annual repairs and upgrades. The other one bit the dust the first year, but its passing has provided a comprehensive kit of spare parts to keep this one going. It has over the years benefited from progressive replacement of its feeble aluminium rivets with bolts and locknuts, and now boasts three-stage legs, giving it sufficient height to straddle the race car. However, its basic construction of lightweight monkey-metal means that the first breath of wind is likely to see a bundle of blue sheeting and mangled aluminium heading for the horizon.
Which begs the question – don’t they have weather in China? Are they completely unfamiliar with the concept of wind? Why, when they could make a substantial replica of a Eezi-Up for maybe half the price of the real deal, do they insist on making tat for 5% of the price? I guess that’s because idiots like me buy them.
Anyway, another year of repair and upgrade has made it battle-ready for the 2012 DC. Let’s just hope we don’t have any weather this year.
One of the prep jobs is to sort out the Eezi-Up awning. Of course it’s not a real Eezi-Up because they cost an arm and a leg, although they do last for ever because they are made of Real Metal. This is a Carrefour special, one of two which we bought about three years ago, and it’s made in China. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about its build quality, China being the undisputed world leader in the manufacture of tat.
However, it has survived three outings at the DC, due to an ongoing programme of annual repairs and upgrades. The other one bit the dust the first year, but its passing has provided a comprehensive kit of spare parts to keep this one going. It has over the years benefited from progressive replacement of its feeble aluminium rivets with bolts and locknuts, and now boasts three-stage legs, giving it sufficient height to straddle the race car. However, its basic construction of lightweight monkey-metal means that the first breath of wind is likely to see a bundle of blue sheeting and mangled aluminium heading for the horizon.
Which begs the question – don’t they have weather in China? Are they completely unfamiliar with the concept of wind? Why, when they could make a substantial replica of a Eezi-Up for maybe half the price of the real deal, do they insist on making tat for 5% of the price? I guess that’s because idiots like me buy them.
Anyway, another year of repair and upgrade has made it battle-ready for the 2012 DC. Let’s just hope we don’t have any weather this year.
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