In which Doris gets to shake Ari Vatenan’s hand.
There was a rather end-of-term atmosphere as the rally started its tenth and final day.
Once again we had stayed at a very nice hotel but arrived too late in the day, with no real opportunity to enjoy its niceness. Doris took a regretful photo of the pool and went to join the queue at the time control, finding that many of the ladies had glammed up most impressively.
After the previous few days of regularity elegance, Sid and Doris felt that they had cracked it, and promptly scored 10s and 6s on the final two sections, with no excuse other than incompetence. This regularity business remains a bit of a mystery.
The afternoon part of the rally had had to be cancelled – do you remember the very impressive rain on the first few days? Well, some of the hillside roads are no more, so the rally finished at lunchtime and whizzed (Jaguar E-Type), roared (Bentley) or whined (Mini doing 100kph at 4,000rpm) down the autoroute to Sanremo. 
During the day there was a certain amount of chit-chat on the WhatsApp group and we were all encouraged to submit selfies from inside the car, so here is one of your amazing Mini crew inside a tunnel somewhere.
Back to Sanremo for a formal welcome under a Finn-ishers arch by rally legend Ari Vatenan, followed by a prize giving dinner in which the glamorous ladies glammed up some more and even Doris managed to dig out a little black dress and some lippy from the bottom of the rally luggage.
Everyone who started had finished the event, thanks to some heroic work by the sweep mechanics, although not everyone finished in the same car that they started in, and some people missed out a bit of the middle. Still, to finish last first you must finish and of course they all beat everyone who didn’t take part.
Prizegiving was based on the Alice in Wonderland caucus-race principle that everyone has won and everyone should have prizes. Overall we finished 9th classic car and got a third-in-class award. Splitting out the tests (drivers) and regularities (navigators), Sid got 8th place overall on the tests with a total time of 27m17s against the winning Porsche’s time of 24m 27s, which is extremely impressive for a 1293cc Mini.
And Doris was 11th navigator, with a total of 1m 30s errors on the regularities, with the winning navigator scoring 0m 47s. Let’s not spend any more time working what would have happened if That Error of 46s hadn’t been committed, and instead congratulate the Mini for being small and nimble and able to get round some slow-moving traffic which delayed other cars.
And now let’s enjoy some videos of Ari Vatican driving. He was already a legend when Sid and Doris started rallying back in the late 1980s, and here are two great videos. First, going up Pike’s Peak, which you may remember towers over Colorado Springs. You will see why we didn’t want to try to get the Jolly Green Giant up there.
And then the (in)famous “Dear God” moment in an Opel Mantra on the 1983 Manx International. A “moment” is a technical rally term for any incident which does not result in total annihilation of the car.
The long journey back to the UK starts tomorrow. Mr Google says if you avoid motorways it will be 900 miles and take about 24 hours of driving, so we are aiming to do it in four days.
PS No sign of the starter motor. Mr TNT’s App says it is still somewhere in the Veneto customs, arguing over the taxes that need to be paid to export it internally to Trentino.
In the video, Terry Harriman’s “Dear God” is as much a prayer as an exclamation. A great moment for anyone who has nearly lost it at full chat. Ari’s “Continue” is the inevitable next moment. Brilliant.
I’ve seen gateposts closer than that. Once Sid side-swiped one and my door flew open and our timecards whooshed out into the forest. We finished the event and won our class.