First Aid

I spent today with other PTOP drivers from cars 22 and 45 on a first aid course at Brokerswood Country Park in Wiltshire.  Kyle and his team set up a series of grizzly car crash scenes around the park using members of staff with fake injuries.

Our first attempt at dealing with a crisis situation was hopeless, we even missed one victim who was underneath the crashed minibus. But during the day, with patient instruction, we got better, applying a tourniquet to a crushed leg that was spurting litres of fake blood, whilst at the same time dealing with a driver who needed his eyes bandaged.  the 'actors' were fantastic, and simulated going into shock, panic, passing out, drunkenness and various degrees of un-cooperativeness - all real world reactions from people who need help.

Despite the seriousness of the subject this hands-on way of teaching us skills was a lot of fun.

One thing we all learnt was the limits of what a first aider can do - they are holding the fort until the medics arrive. But help can't come if you can't give proper information about where you are, as Kyle explains in his 'top tip' video:

Siberian Mosquitos

From The New Yorker,

"Nothing short of a good breeze keeps Siberian mosquitoes down. They laugh at organic-based repellents. Strong repellent with DEET is disagreeable to them, but they work around it. Thick smoke can be effective, but you have to stand right in it. In past times, native peoples and Russians wove fine netting of the long hairs in a horse’s tail and wore the nets throughout the summer. Members of a tribe called the Tungus carried smoke pots with them wherever they went, while another native people, the Voguls, retreated into smoke-filled huts for the summer months and became dormant, doing most of their hunting and travelling in the wintertime. The sheer volume of mosquitoes might cause an observer not to mention the gnats, flies, and tiny biting insects (known as “no-see-’ums” in America); there are plenty of all those as well."

Since I have read this I bought insect repelling socks, hat, trousers and spray.  I've also got a battery powered repellant for the hotel rooms. They aren't having me.

Where is Rhubarb and Custard?

Nearly in China!

Hats

We have an open top car so we need hats.

I've decided to take two, both supplied by Dents of London (see earlier posts):

 

First, a trappers hat for cold mornings and high mountains.  I've tested this in my convertible and it works a treat.  Also can be worn in bed.


Second, a drivers hat for keeping the sun off.  This one hasn't arrived yet and I'm not quite sure how it stays on if there's a wind blowing.  We shall see.

Gloves

My everyday car is a BMW M3 with a lovely thick leather covered steering wheel.  I never really understood why steering wheels were leather covered until I started driving Rhubarb and Custard, which has a wheel made of some kind of hard plastic or Bakelite.  It's quite an unpleasant thing to hold in your hands for long periods and tends to get slippery if your hands sweat.  Very quickly I found that it was much nicer to wear leather gloves when driving,

The trouble with gloves is that your hands get hot if the sun comes out. On our last trip I tried to overcome this by wearing finger-less cycling gloves but these aren't leather they are some kind of technical fabric and didn't give me any grip on the wheel.

As a result I've been doing research on gloves and have found a firm called Dents, which is based in Wiltshire in England and has been hand making gloves since 1777.  They made James Bond's driving gloves for Skyfall - how cool is that!

I bought three pairs of gloves from them:

Finger-less unlined driving gloves for normal driving. I tried these out on a roof down drive on a cold spring day last week and they were most excellent.

Full fingered, string-backed and lined driving gloves for cold weather. The string backing stops your hands getting too hot.

Full fingered, string-backed but unlined driving gloves made of peccary leather which is supposed to be the best possible leather for gloves.  However I found that the lack of lining exposed the seams internally and that they were not comfortable and so they went back to Dents for a refund.

Photography

Apart from getting the car ready, obtaining visas, having various jabs, booking flights and sundry other housekeeping matters we have to think about how to keep a record of this monumental trip.

There's this blog of course - about which more another time - and there will also be a photographic record, but that isn't as easy as it sounds.

The reality on a rally is that both driver and navigator are busy nearly all the time. The event is time driven so stopping at the side of the road to take a few snaps is rarely an option. We are also there to enjoy the moment - not to spend all our time recording the moment.

On the other hand 35 days spent on one of life's great adventures without keeping some photographic record doesn't seem quite right.

The ERA has photographer Gerard Brown in tow on its events and he does a great job because he knows just where to stand to capture the cars at dramatic moments.  I've bought several of his pictures of Rhubarb and Custard. They are expensive but really high quality so I think worth the money.

The ERA also makes a video of the event but this is less satisfactory because with over 100 cars it isn't possible to give everyone equal screen time.  Basically the more oddball characters make better TV as does anyone who has broken down, crashed etc. If you are having a more straightforward rally then you won't feature much, although of course the video acts as a reminder of the feel of the thing.

I did think about bringing a drone along to take aerial shots of the car but my drone is quite bulky and the mini ones take very poor quality pictures.  I was also a bit concerned about flying it in Russia and being arrested as a spy.

So here's what I've decided to do.

• I'm going to bring along my Nikon SLR fitted with a 28-200mm Nikon lens. This lens is is off-the-scale amazing (see the picture at the top of this post). The camera is light and simple to use.

• We've fitted the rollover bar of the car with a Go Pro on a Feiyu Tech  gimble so that it holds steady as we are driving along.  The Go Pro can be operated from my iPhone. We also have a remote control so that in theory we can pan and tilt the camera from the cockpit.  I have to admit that in practice this is difficult when you are also trying to navigate.

• I've got a second Feiyu Tech gimble on a selfie stick so that I can put the iPhone out of the car window and shoot video as we drive along.  These gimbles are pretty amazing at correcting the movement of the car or your arm  but of course they do need to be kept charged. 

One problem is that video fills up the iPhone memory quite quickly and so I've bought a PhotoFast i-FlashDrive Max 128 GB USB 3.0 flash-drive.  This tiny gadget is driven by an iPhone app that can be used to transfer files including video files from the iPhone to the flash-drive without needing a computer or any other device. Having backed up to the flash-drive you can then delete the video from the iPhone to create more storage space.

Face Masks

Def need a face mask for crossing Mongolia. But which one to choose?

A Little More Competition

Car 68 is a 1968 (how did they do that?) Mustang owned by Peter Weigelt and Beat Hirs from Switzerland.

These nut jobs ran a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost on the 2015 Alpine Trial - how it went around the hairpins I do not know.  From memory I think they did pretty well.

Here's a photo of the Mustang and below one of the Ghost standing next to Rhubarb and Custard.

Mongolia - A Preview

We already know where the overnight stops are in Mongolia but of course we don't know the exact route we will be following.  In general the rally organisers try to find interesting and beautiful routes that will also stretch the cars and the teams.

I've plotted on Google Earth the stopovers through Mongolia and into the first camp in Russia.

The red line is the route we would take as the crow flies - which obviously we won't be doing.

The map below is from the website 'Dangerous Roads' and the pins show some of the World's most dangerous roads that we might take if that's what the organisers have in mind.  At least one of them is 4x4 only and has a gradient of 35% so I don't think we will be doing that.

I thought if I looked carefully at Google Earth I could second guess the route but it's completely impossible. The various pictures postyed onto Google Earth make Mongolia look rather lush, green and rolling. But I gather the rally organisers are capable of finding dry, dusty and hilly parts as well!

Where's CLM 570?

Currently in Antwerp on The Cosco Denmark.

RPS Video

RPS has produced a lovely film of the cars they have prepared for PtoP 2016.  I initially thought that CLM 570 didn't appear but I've been told it does at 50 secs).  Follow the link below to watch it.

https://www.facebook.com/179002148782300/videos/1312910428724794/

Final Test Run

Alpine Trial 2015

We signed up CLM 570 for the Alpine trial 2015 against all advice.  The rally starts and finishes at Annecy in the French Alps each day and twists and winds over spectacular mountain colls and passes. The roads are frequently single track and some are just a black line on the map.  Even in our family BMW I would hesitate to drive some of these roads, CLM 570 has vague steering and drum brakes so we were very nervous.

In the end the driving was fine and the car behaved itself.  We did have two hours by the roadside on the pre race day with a mystery electrical problem.  The ignition timing, fuel mix and spark plugs were all changed and something made it work but we aren't really sure what.  The plan is to fit a more robust starter motor.  We also need to carry a spare rotor arm.

The rally itself was quite spectacular as Gerard Brown's photos show (they are his copyright so please don't pinch them).  we adopted the approach of staying mainly in second gear on the hilly bits so that we had lots of grunt on the way up and engine braking on the way down.  With the brakes we used a stab and release system whereas in a modern car you would probably continually feather the brakes - but the drums would overheat and fade if we did that. We also adjusted the brakes every evening. Only once did we have to reverse on a hairpin bend, and the car always felt secure.

Unfortunately our Brantz wasn't working and this, together with poor navigating put us 29th out of 45 cars.  By day three however we were getting the hang of things.