just to let you guys know, in 2 weeks from now, i'll be heading off on yet another
for those who don't know, it's a cancer council fundraiser event where you drive a sub-1000 aud shitbox car through the australian outback. for safety reasons, it's not a race, and you're divided up into buddy groups, but it's still quite the adventure!
a quick overview of my previous rallies:
2012 rally: team "sub-saharan taxi service"
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i teamed up with a random person off the internet, who i've never met before, and we drove a 1995 ford festiva from perth to melbourne, to start the rally, and, after swapping the front hubs over for reco'd ones, as we blew through the original ones on the drive over, drove it on very rough roads (old strzelecki road and stuff) to cairns
that guy and i ended up very annoyed with eachother near the end
and apart from wheel bolts snapping and leaving the car, a handful of blown tyres, and rubbing wheels to the guards (fixed with a jack as we didn't pack a hammer. rookie mistake) we didn't have too many issues.
we raised just over 4 grand for the cancer council
2013 rally: team "interbrewsters million"
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i teamed up with a guy i've met a couple of times, who lives in melbourne, and drove a 1980(ish? not sure of the year) GH mitsubishi sigma wagon (2.6 4cyl 5 speed), and drove it to adelaide to start the rally. annoyingly, we hit a kangaroo on the way over and had to spend all the time we had calculated to visit adelaide fixing up the front end of the car :p looked okay ish enough :p
then we drove from adelaide to perth via ayers rock (uluru) and just straight through dusty dirty sandy roads and muddy tracks. after that we added another bit to our trip and drove said shitbox a bit north, and a bit south and a bit central and back to melbourne. also, this car entered in the 2014 rally too
apart from hitting the kangaroo and some carby tuning the only issue we've had was a tail light lens that fell off on the bumpy roads.. oh, and with a dodgy gearstick surround, well, if you drive through big puddles of mud, you'll have an in car mud fountain
. and with leaky everything, your feet will freeze in cold rainy nights. also, the heater didn't work great fun though!we raised about 5 grand for the cancer council
2014 rally: team "Waffles"
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i teamed up with someone i've never met again, who also lives in the melbourne area, a woman even?! it was a huge gamble, as we'd be spending a lot of time in a small ish car doing a fairly stressful trip together.. but that worked out geniously! she's now my missus
2013 copilot bought a second sigma for an engine swap to one with less kays, but turns out the 2.0 engine from a 1985 GN sigma doesn't fit in a GH... so we bought the car off him for peanuts.. it did need some work to get a roadworthyness certificate, but we made it happen.
we drove it the scenic route from melbourne to perth for the start of the rally, which was perth to darwin via the gibb river road. amazing route, really! the car, with its 2.0 4 speed wasn't the best for the long distances, but held up great from melbourne to perth. and even from there it did well until we got to broome, where we cooked a headgasket. but after some liquid headgasket formula, we were on our way again. sadly a couple days later, in the rally, after all the rough stuff and river crossings and the likes were don, when we were literally 1 or 2 kays off the dirt, back on the bitumen, we blew a welch plug and our car was pronounced dead. if we had broken down earlier that day, it would've been on a trailer, and it'd've been fixed, but too many other shitboxes broke down before us, and there was no room for us on the trailers anymore
we did get a medal for the car breaking down
we raised nearly 4200 dollars for the cancer council
