Thanks for the Pizza Ellis!

OK - so the title of this update to my blog may seem a little strange, for those of you who have been following my recent antics with the Spitfire, you will know that I embarked on CT's 10 Countries Run a week ago today (Thursday 10th September). A lot of preparation was done to the car, including a good secondhand exhaust manifold to replace the existing one. As many of you will know, the 1500 Spitfire manifold is a crap design and I spent hours putting the replacement one on. The good news was, it held together quite well up to the start at The Plough in Enfield, by Dover, it sounded like a Tractor again!

Anyway, my brother Richard and I decided to soldier on with it until the first overnight stop at Beziers on the south coast of France. So we left Calais and motored down to the control stop at Le Manswhere a bit more Gun Gum was plastered on to little effect. It wasn't so bad on the autoroutes when a light throttle was being used, but when we came to the Control Stop at Condom I fear we may have woken up the assembled drivers in their Triumphs as we arrived about an hour later than them having rested near Bordeaux a couple of hours earlier.

A bit more Gun Gum, then we left for the run up into Spain and Andorra. The road into Spain was great, although the car did suffer a bit from low oil pressure and fuel vaporisation during the long hot climb up the mountains. When we got near to Andorra we were turned around by other 10CR participants as it was effectively closed due to the volume of traffic. We sought out a new route to get us to Beziers, taking us down a very windy road to Perpignan where we could join the Autoroute to get us to our hotel at Beziers. I decided to take the carbs off, lose the heatshield as it was getting in the way of fixing the manifold/downpipe joint and join it together using plenty of Firegum (I had come prepared - but forgotten to pack the downpipe gasket!)

After evening dinner and a welcome sleep in a comfortable bed, I put everything back together, we had breakfast and left for the Millau Control Stop about an hour late. The car was running great now, so quiet we could hear the CD Player - what luxury!

After taking the obligatory photo's and video of the bridge we departed on the great journey to Italy and Switzerland, taking in a detour through the Ardeche to Montelimar to avoid some taxing hill climbs and give the exhaust joint an easy time. All was going well until the motorway services on the Auto route near Grenoble. Having fuelled the car, cleaned it's windscreen, we pulled out onto the motorway, when all of a sudden the engine started rattling badly and we lost power, so we limped along to the next exit, got onto the normal roads and called the AA.

To cut a long story short, the car was recovered to a local garage, we were put up in a local hotel - excellent food - to await a hire car the next day (Sunday) Morning came and the AA confirmed that a hire car had been arranged and a very nice young french lady taxi driver drove us at great speed to the outskirts of Grenoble where we collected a Peugeot Partner Teepee diesel. By this time it was 11.00am, so we decided to skip Italy and Switzerland and head straight for the next overnight stop at Kerkrade in the Netherlands - we made it by 8.00pm, went through Luxembourg, Germany and the Netherlands , but missed dinner. However Ellis Stokes, the organiser, kindly got a couple of Pizza's brought in which we eagerly devoured whilst having a great evening talking to fellow participants Paul and David Lonsdale.
The next morning (Monday)we rose early and motored through Belgium back to Calais where we swapped the French car for a British registered Toyota which was duly returned to the Tonbridge depot by 5.00pm that evening.

The latest news from the AA? The french garage has reported that the fuel pump has gone and the car is running on 3 cylinders, and the car is being repatriated some time in the next week or so to my local garage who will give me a quick diagnosis of the problem.

Will we attempt it a third time? Ask me in a few month's time when I've sorted the car, we did enjoy this 10CR, we got a lot further than last time - maybe 3rd time lucky?

Anyway - here is a link to video's that Richard took:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrRichski