2023 Sid between journeys, Monte Carlo, Desert Challenge and other outings

 

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In which Sid punctuates the school routine with jolly outings to icy snowy places, hot sandy places, museums and shows. 

Here is Sid’s rambling diary from New Year 2023 through to Easter. Do read over Sid’s shoulder. If you would like a quick read then look at the pictures or just skip to the end.

Sid and Doris are between journeys, but even so not entirely idle. Sid still goes to school two days a week and finds it very educational. Doris has been singing so Sid has amused himself with rallies and larking about.

New Year finds us with James and Aleasha at Beaulieu National Motor Museum. There is some good advice for lady motorists. Do read this panel from The woman and the Car of 1909.

This was before Pat Moss and and Ann Wisdom won the Liege – Rome – Liege rally in 1960, reckoned to be one of the all time great drives.

www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/october-1960/21/le-marathon-de-la-route/

Their works Austin Healey is up for sale. Bonhams have put a neat vinyl history of the crew’s and car’s record.

As they reckon on £400,000 for the car they may go back to correct their spelling of Liege. Even so it is a very nice car, though it doesn’t have a little drawer under the seat.

When Sid was taught to drive we could still be examined on hand signals: turning right, left, slowing down and stopping. Generally we have had flashing orange indicators which took over from trafficators that pinged out from the B pillar. Before that we waved an arm out of the window, but getting the UK driver’s arm out of the left window would be difficult. So, as we saw at Beaulieu, what could be easier than a foot-pump inflated hand to signal your intentions?

 

Sid’s next adventure was with Teal, benefiting from engineering of a similar era to the Healey, out on the five day ERA Hero Winter Challenge to Monte Carlo.

Catherine was off singing and perhaps quite relieved that Lorna Harrison volunteered to nav from Troyes to Monte Carlo and home. Lorna’s husband/driver Mike is no fan of night driving so this was a good chance for Lorna to try the Monte.

On the second day the route went through the Gorge of the Meouge, the lizard rocks pictured here not in February. Then via Ribiers and Sisteron, all scenes from the Phillipson brothers’ adolescence. The rally even stopped for a break at the Cafe de la Citadelle looking over the Durance. Do go, it’s really nice.

Owen had fitted double bulb PIAA lights and we had a splendid night section chasing about in the hills, monstering a 340bhp XJS (yes, really) through the wiggly bits. The driver was Ed Abbott who had worked at Jaguar with Norman Dewis on the XJ27/XJS prototypes. Only open this link if you are an utter anorak: www.abbottjaguar.co.uk/eds-XJS.html   Told you.

The roads were not uniformly icy. On a cold wet night beware of the surface by river bridges: it freezes there first, as a Healey discovered. We passed it nose down in a ditch, the other side of a culvert. Happily it was later pulled out with no more damage than a lost mud guard.

The final regularity was up the Col de Turini, a classic stage. Teal is geared to drive to and from events so not shown at his best on a long, steep climb. We got a small trophy for second in the class from which the real winners came. Sid not as fast as Ms Moss by quite a long way, and Ann Wisdom didn’t have to do regularities with speed changes.

The last day was plagued with road works that had been postponed for the WRC Monte and the Automobile Club de Monaco’s own events. So maybe it is time to move the Winter Challenge to a new destination (Geneva?), especially as the crews almost all sit in the bar wherever they are.

Having started the year with the oldest cars it was fun to find the prototype Gordon Murray Automotive  T50  prototype  on  the  train  with  us. The team were very generous showing Sid around the car. Gordon Murray designed the 1990s Maclaren F1 and now wants to bring the idea up to date at his own company. Still driver in the middle with passengers either side and behind. Now with  a four litre V12, 650bhp and under a ton. More than that, it has a fan to pull air from under the car for ground-effect down force and a very clean garage floor. This car was on its way to Nardo for high speed testing with technicians in a chase car. With UK taxes they will be about £2.8m each, which is very reasonable because you will not need a left hand drive one to go on Continental holidays.

Being Sid is vairy busy and next stop was the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, which is the FIA Rally Raid round after the Dhaka (now held entirely in Saudi Arabia).  Sid arrives with time for messing about with cars so we take Ian’s Healey up Jebel Jais, the local Pike’s Peak. 

The car now has proper Denis Welch engine with a fast road cam, and as luck would have it Ian had just finished running it in. It pulls very well and does not seem to mind going up about 2,000 metres. Ras Al Khaimah have built this fabulous 12 mile road for tourism, though it may not be coincidental that it also leads to Sheikh Qasimi’s palace which is just beyond where the public road ends.

Soon enough it is time to go to work, meeting our ADDC Saudi team mates Derek and Yahya who are both excellent desert drivers with well modified FJ40s, while Ian still has his LWB winch-equipped SVT Ford. As Sweep team 4 we go in after the last competitor to look after the tired, lost and broken down. (I know, that does sound like Sid.)

In the very deserty picture Ian and I have climbed to get signal and radio in what we have found. The Chinese crew have had a cylinder head gasket fail. With permission from control we leave them to be recovered by their service guys. Next day they are out again with a new engine and a bucketful of penalties. Seen here with the Sid in a picture sent to our Chinese family in Shanghai.

 

In the next picture a pair of bikes that we tried to shepherd to the road. One had a battery problem. The other had a pilot problem. Weighing 130 kilos meant he and the bike had too much to carry around. He got exhausted and the bike needed more fuel than could be got in the tank. Eventually we and Sweep 2 put both bikes onto their toast rack truck and left the desert in near darkness. We should have done that earlier.

A good part of the entry was made up of 4WD buggies with about 200bhp and two feet of suspension travel. This seems to put a lot of strain on the CV joints though we did get this one rolling again.

You may feel Sid lives the life of Riley. This is Sid’s dormitory bed in the ADDC bivouac. Action great, food good, accommodation poor, loos and showers well up to the standard of a wet Tibetan farmyard. It’s a tough job …

Sid is given to air museums. The De Havilland factory was at Hatfield so it’s a natural visit for Sid and Robin, who used to be a plane spotter. This is ideal for both, as neither minds how long we look at a plane or take to read a panel or how long a story the guides wish to tell. We have all day in a museum where you could probably read every panel in about 24 hours.

As it is NAR (not actually raining, for the new reader) we start outside looking around this Sea Vixen, a carrier based twin boom jet. Suddenly it starts to rain so we and a guide shelter under the wing. Did we know that US Navy pilots made a straight approach and that UK pilots made a left hand turn down to the deck, had fewer landing mishaps and to enable this often had the cockpit on the left of the fuselage? So we don’t mind if it rains.

Maybe the best known De Havilland is the twin Merlin engined DH98 Mosquito, the wooded wonder made of plywood, with many parts coming from local furniture factories. First flown in November 1940 they went into service a year later, so fast they could be used for photo reconnaissance with no armament. So strong they could wield anti tank guns. We spend a long time looking at the prototype. Sid is one of hundreds funding The People’s Mosquito to build a new one.

To finish here is a great outing with Doris. We are great fans of Damon Runyon and the musical Guys and Dolls,  based on his story The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown first published in 1933 against the background of Prohibition. This production is at The Bridge Theatre, near Tower Bridge, which has been built to give theatre in the round. More than that: the groundlings are actually on the stage, parts of which rise up so the actors are three feet above the crowd.

Before the show the groundlings may read copies of The Telegraph where the tipsters are crying up horses Paul Revere, Epitaph and Valentine. Guess what? The gambler marries the Salvation Army Doll and Miss Adelaide marries Nathan (to change his ways tomorrow).

It is a fabulous show, do go.