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- Created on Sunday, 13 December 2009 18:08
Casablanca Challenge
It is over a week now since we arrived home safely after our Moroccan adventure, where the weather was sunny and even warm (up to 28 C).
Very tough (proper) rally with long stages and tight time schedules, long climbs (with dangerously high side drops). All twisty in tarmac but usually narrow, with uneven road sides (gravel) and potholes. Great rally roads and wonderful scenery.
Our Magnette had a rough time, but we soon settled down confortably in second place competing for the Morocon Trophy (for cars that started in Southern Spain) trailing a 4.5 liter Alvis from german friends Helga and Rudy Friedrichs. But on the last 3 days of the event we cracked and broke one steel wheel per day! Very unexpected. After 53 years of good and loyal service (including the 2007 P2P and last year's Safari) it seems they all joined to say "enough is enough" ... Fatigue as they say, but I presume the hard PU suspension bushes and us cutting corners may also have had a saying in this. Impossible to find replacement wheels there so I had to weld (!) two of them to keep us on the road (another one went down the mountain never to be seen again...).
Would you believe we received the six 15 x 5.5 Elantra steel wheels the day before we left? But of course we never bothered to adapt them in a hurry and fit them... Cracking wheels was the least of my worries...
Apart from that, we also broke one of the rear "U" bolts holding the rear axle springs in place... And after the end of the rally, when riving north to Tangiers with no spare, the diff finally broke (including banjo), draining all the oil onto the pavement... With no drive we had to get a trailer and a taxi but we managed to get the car pushed into the fast ferry and cross to Spain, where we had another trailer and taxi waiting for us... Overall a good experience for next year's Peking to Paris! (Unfortunately one competitor went over the edge and died - or vice-versa, not yet known. The car, a pink DS, rolled several times some 60-70 metres down. His wife was all right. This marked the last 3 days of the event.)
The Magnette is still on a trailer somewhere on the way here from Spain. But I am having it sent to the UK for a final preparation for next year's P2P: - we will need to select a new complete rear axle; - the new stage 2 engine was a disapointment, burning too much oil and not enough power; - and there is a number of other small details that need attending to.
