In which Sid and Doris drive up a lot of hairpins but don’t see many views.
Our Rally Director on this event is Fred Gallagher, a man with a most impressive history of international rallying back in the days when men were real men and haircuts were best described as mullets. Fred has done a lot of rallying in this region, and importantly still has a lot of friends in this region including Our Man Luigi. OML has got an astonishing 420 letters of permission from villages, communes, towns and I don’t know perhaps souvenir kiosk owners to allow the rally to go through. And he and Fred have dug through their route books of rallies past to find some really interesting classic stages up in the northernmost end of Italy.
Which made the low-lying cloud today a bit of a disappointment.
We left the Very Grand Hotel Tremezzo today, taking the Mini out of its dry little underground parking slot – the orange-and-white uniformed hotel attendant looked at it and said “Esscussa meea, issa thatta Meester Beeen car?” Rowan Atkinson has a lot to answer for.
The road book required us to climb to the tops of hills and passes and admire the stunning views so we dutifully did part A and found we couldn’t do part B and carried on.
Do you remember that I mentioned that after one of the Mini’s wipers fell off on the way down, they are now both tied to the car with dental floss? (strong, light and waterproof, a useful thing in a bush mechanic’s toolkit)
Well it paid off yesterday because the other wiper fell off but stayed attached to the bonnet so Sid could easily jump out and smite it with a hammer to re-attach it. Among the other 39 rally participants are several cars which are usually only driven in nice weather, so wiper problems are not uncommon. Here’s a photo of a manual solution from another rally member.
I should tell you that there is a WhatsApp group where we are all sharing photos so that will make up for my lack of zap with the camera sometimes and also give you, my treasured and sole reader, a bit of variety.
Onwards and downwards into Bolzano and a very impressive traffic jam which I also failed to take any pictures of. To console you for that, here is a picture of tonight’s rally car park taken from my bedroom. Note that the two spaces reserved for electric cars are empty.
I haven’t been talking much about the vintage cars taking part – we have seven pre-war cars including several Bentleys. These are not the easiest things to maintain, and as I left the car park tonight Graham was reluctantly setting to on the task of “kingpin greasing – I hate it. Wherever you put the grease in it squirts out somewhere else.”
PS Last night’s underground car parking for the Mini cost an eye-watering €38. I tried to get a discount on the grounds that the Mini is only about half the size of the average car but no joy.