Skoda Rally Blog

About a year ago, I saw an article about the Plymouth-Dakar challenge, which involved buying a ?100 (or thereabouts) car, and driving it from Plymouth to Dakar, in 21 days. This was to raise money for charities in the Gambia by handing the cars over at the end and letting them be auctioned off. Sounded like a good idea to me, but I was too late to get an entry for that year (entries close in April, but the cars don’t set off until around Christmas). But I’ve been keeping an eye on it this year (although it’s now changed to the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge), and I’ve put an entry in. Probably even more stupid than entering the Sunseeker, but there you go. I read an article in a bike magazine when I was 17 about a guy doing a similar trip on an XT600, and since then I’ve dreamed of doing something like that. OK, it’s not on a bike, but that would be crazy. This is just silly. There is one problem – Gambia is a Left-Hand drive country, so if I get in (and apparently it’s over-subscribed by 10 to 1, so that’s not guaranteed, especially as it’s not first-come first-served), then I’ll be needing an LHD car, preferably something like a sierra or granada estate – something old-school and reliable, and big enough to make the journey comfortable, with lots of extra provisions with us!

Anyway, enough of this crazyness! Next event is the Somerset Stages, and there will be a change for this – Kev is no longer navigating as he’s too busy to do it. So I’ve managed (somehow) to convince Paul to give it a go. He thinks that I drive too slowly on the stages (as I’ve not crashed yet), so we’ll see about that, won’t we. It’s on the 23rd April, so I guess I’d better fix the front dampers on the car, hadn’t I? Hmmm….