In which Sid tries to explain to you and to himself why, precisely, he is doing the RAC in an elderly Peugeot with an elderly service crew.
There is some history here in the relationship and the car. Sid and Doris have known Dave Gough and Ti MotorSport on the rally scene since about 1990, through Southern Car Club and friends Sue and Graham Orchard-Morris and Roger Binyon whose cars he prepared.
In 2007 when Sid and Doris wanted a car for the ERA London to New Delhi rally Sid bought a JDM Honda EG6 Civic SiR and asked Dave at Ti Motorsport to prepare it for the run through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India. A reliable car with longish wheel base, air conditioning and 170bhp from the 1.6 engine and a gentle LSD. Very popular in Ireland on Tarmac though with no form on gravel. As you can see we prepped it for rolling down the Karakorum.
The event was cancelled because although the Iranian Motor Federation had got permission for the rally the Foreign Office advised against travel in Pakistan because of happenings in Balochistan and Afghanistan. So we were left with a near group N car. Oh no, what to do? Just add ProFlex suspension, a 5.1 final drive and go forest rallying at home. So standard we even kept the air-con.
And so it was that Cyril the Civic was a fabulous rally car only ever failing to finish an event once in all those years. In 2017 Sid and Cyril finished the RAC in 40th place, out of 150 starters. And then Sid piled him onto the rocks on the 2019 edition. In 2019 Sid crashed out on the first morning. The RAC allows you to restart if you can get the car running. It never ran again, nor could it. This picture completely fails to show the comprehensive damage under the car, and a few minutes later a Volvo having the identical accident used Cyril as an Armco substitute – and managed to drive away and finish. (He did ring up later to offer compensation, but Sid had to admit that the car was already unrepairable.)
So we do not have the splendid Cyril for the 2021 five day Roger Albert Clark, the UK’s premier clubman 2WD rally and adventure. Sid needs another car…
Now to the history of the 504 saloon. In 2011 Sid offered Dave a run on Philip Young’s ERA 2012 World Cup Rally from London to Cape Town. Why did we not take Cyril or one of Dave’s MG ZRs, as most of the hatchbacks were Owen’s ZRs? Maybe we thought a Safari spec 504 would be tougher or more romantic. Who knows?
Anyway, the deal was that Dave would prepare and keep a car while Sid would meet the entry and many of the other costs. So Dave set about uprating his 504 Coupe, regularly sending updates to Sid’s office in Dubai. It was going to be bloody lovely and just the thing, a reliable two litre on twin Webers with vairy robust suspension. (That yellow car is a ZR which had a great finishing record on the Cape Town rally.)
Eventually the car looked very nice nice, like this for sale at RPS. Handsome isn’t it?
But just a few weeks before the London to Cape Town Dave sold it (to people Sid and Doris now know) and started to work on an injection saloon. Here it is after the 2012 event back at Ti. It had a sump guard, rally seats, some sort of cage, a big fuel tank, wired castor arms and very possibly some other rally modifications. I can see a helmet net. But no lights, which meant Dave drove it into a trench at night in Sudan from which the geometry never recovered screwing tyres as we went. (The front wheel you see here was bought off a parked car in Kenya.)
We left Brooklands on 31st December, drove into London, were flagged away at midnight from the Houses of Parliament by Lord Snooty and headed to Kent for the first competitive miles: a UK style road rally and a stage through a forest. Neither of the crew is a navigator but by the time we had finished those sections we were up to 13th overall.
And as we left that Kent forest the injection failed and we could not make progress. ‘I want to die’, said Dave and Sid said, ‘That’s OK, because I want to kill you.’ A friend from Southern towed us to Dover. And so began a tortuous trip through France where we bought a big new fuel pump but not a metering unit, on through the freezing Alps to Italy and by ferry to Greece where after a truck journey we (mostly Dave) converted the car overnight to carb. Just one little one judging from the tasteful yellow gaffer trunking in the engine bay above.
We were both entirely committed to getting to Cape Town. Much of Sid’s budget was left with the Greek pirate who sold us the non-injection head and carb. We did not spend much on food or drink, Sid arriving home about ten pounds lighter. In fact we borrowed some just-in-case money from kind James and Max Stephenson and were relieved to give it him back at the end. It seemed that most days something would fail. The alternator was rewound over night in Tanzania (?) after a day of going on battery until we could get a charge via our jump leads. If a border crossing took a long time this was actually quite helpful while we blagged some more charge. Later we stopped for two days in Namibia’s Kaprivi Strip. Namibia is a story of its own. We did get to Cape Town on the same day as the rally and were not the last car classified as a finisher.
Anyway, while Sid was initially very angry it was rather a bonding experience and Sid continued with Ti running Cyril season after season and never having a problem. Until he beached the Honda.
So here we are in 2021. This RAC will be Dave’s last rally as service crew because he is so old he will not tell anyone, but consider he worked on Datsuns for Andy Dawson in the 1970s and then on the 555 team in China. He has been using the Cape Town 504 rally car in Kenya and it is now a solid old thing which we have put some miles on in testing and just driving around. It has a real Custom Cage, BreMax loom, ProFlex suspension, Motor Drive seats and some rather clunky belts, a nice heated screen but no heater. We can enter it in the Safari class. It would be a nice send off for the Cape Town 504 (which must be sold) and Dave (who should be gently confined to his workshop) to finish the RAC together.