Rain and roadworks
Mac Mackenney | 13th Oct 2009
11:45 :: There’s a good spirit amongst the team, but I’m not sure if it was right for me to drag Chris along for this training run. He’s experienced in such long-distance drives, being a co-record holder for the European Cape Cold to Cape Hot run – top of Norway to the bottom of Spain. I’m not sure if he’s just tired from all his recent travels and upheavals at home with the birth of his new son, or whether he’s desperately missing his family and longs to be back at home with them – I suspect the latter.
Our drive to Cape Town will be hard though and so if we are to succeed and more importantly keep it safe, we must start to train together. The best way to train for a 10,000 mile non-stop drive though is to get out there and put some miles under our belts. It’s only then that we will get to know how each other work, how we will drive, navigate and sleep and be able to trust each other when on the road and confined in our tin-box for 2 continuous weeks.
We had a few hiccups at the start and ended up getting separated for a while due to the heavy traffic out of Oslo, but were soon back together again driving in convoy. It was wet and the roads were full of trucks negotiating the series of road works where the new truck road will be built. After just one hour, we had only just managed to maintain Stirling Moss’ average speed of around 40mph. We’re not setting out to beat it, just match it so that the Portuguese press can meet us at the finish point in Lisbon.
We have told them that we will be there at 3pm this Friday afternoon. From there, we will drive down to Faro to meet Stirling Moss himself and then it’s a fairly long drive back up to Santander where the guys will be put back on a plane for the journey home. Jim and I will take the P&O Ferry back to the UK from Bilbao to Portsmouth.
We continued on the main roads hoping to get ahead of Stirling’s time and so allow us to drive on the original roads that he took, but we just couldn’t make up ground. We weren’t racing, just driving along at a steady pace keeping up with the traffic, but we ended up just matching the time that Stirling had achieved all those years ago. As the hours ticked by, we were more and more amazed as to how he managed to maintain such a high average speed on such difficult roads – guess that’s why he’s one of the most successful racing drivers of the 20th Century.
HOMEPAGE :: Oslo To Lisbon
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