Day 2 of the Navigational Rally
Hotel - Ducati Factory - Wine Factory - Carpi - Lamborghini Museum - Hotel
The second day of rallying with an
early start. Luckily the clocks had gone back the previous
night so it didn't seem as bad as it could have. We left the hotel
on time with our 5-4-3-2-1 countdown, and I thought I'd sussed the
stopwatch business. We arrived at the Ducati factory without making
any navigational errors and felt quite proud of ourselves. When our
stopwatch told us it was time to cross the line we did so, and I thought
we were pretty well on time. This was the first 'special stage' that
we had encountered and apparently we had to drive round some cones in a
circle, the first circle taking exactly 7 seconds and the second exactly 8
seconds. That looked OK, so I thought that if I pressed the
lap/reset button on the stopwatch the counter would go back to zero and
let me count 7 seconds. No such luck, it just stopped! So we
counted 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. etc. and totally messed it up. We were told
after that we'd gone over the time control too early, so somehow the
stopwatch had been wrong - we never worked out why.
Here's one of Cuan's pics of the cars outside the
factory. I didn't get any decent pics there as we had to go in for a
tour of the factory and museum, and by the time we came out it was late.
That was when I realised we had to work out our own start times by adding
the time allowed for breaks to our arrival time, and that nobody would
tell us when we should be leaving.
I'm afraid that motorbikes to me are death machines, as I know too many
people who have had loved ones killed or maimed while riding them, so I
found the Ducati place of no interest at all. That also explains why
I've got no pictures of motorbikes to display here as I wasn't interested
in taking pics there. Sorry to all bike lovers reading this!
We left the factory as near as we could to the time we thought we
should, using a combination of our watches and mobile phones to work out
what time we thought it was. We could easily have been a minute
early, but who knows! We started the stopwatch when we started to
move.
The next stage was cool, no getting lost, so we thought we might be
back in with a chance. We were waiting to cross the line and Karen
went to start Sput up in plenty of time, only to find he wouldn't
start! Disaster strikes again! We jumped out and told the
people behind us what had happened, and had no end of volunteers ready to
push him over the line, not to help us do it on time, but to ensure that
we were out of the way when it was their turn to cross! They pushed
us to the middle of the car park, out of the way of the cars coming
through, and we stayed there until everyone else had gone through.
There was another special stage there, a figure of eight, with the first
circle taking 8 seconds and the second 7. At least we didn't have to
attempt that one! The trouble was that people were taking a while to
go through it, although they had to keep their wheels turning before they
crossed the first line, so by the time the last cars came through there
were several Minis driving round the car park before it was their turn to
go. They decided to use Sputnik as a roundabout, some even thought
he was part of the course. It all got a bit scary at times.
Still it was quite reassuring watching other cars doing the special stage
all wrong - the wrong way round the figure of eight, or doing it totally
wrong. Made us feel a bit better about the previous one we'd messed
up.
Eventually the service van turned up and after checking him over they
discovered that it was the earth strap from the battery. When we'd
picked Sput up from Birmingham the guy had showed Karen that he'd done a
great job and even painted inside the boot - he'd made too good a job,
there was too much paint there for the earth to make a proper
contact. Goodness knows how he'd made it that far before he broke
down.
Once Sputnik was running again we grabbed our
bottles of free wine and made a dash for the last checkpoint of the
morning in the Square at Carpi. The checkpoint had closed by the
time we got there so all points went out of the window. We were told
to park up at the end of the queue rather than in our pole position, so we
went and hid. We had the usual breakfast food (ham and cheese,
although there wasn't much left by then) for lunch, and then tried to find
out what we had to do about leaving.
We asked the people at the
checkpoint what time we had to leave as we thought we'd have to be last
in, last out. We then discovered we still had to leave first, so we
tore back to Sput at the end of the queue as we thought we could still
make it. Typically, as the battery had been disconnected his
immobiliser wouldn't go off, so it took us what seemed like ages to get
him started. We crossed the line a few seconds behind car number 03
and started the stopwatch again as we crossed the line.
We had a good run through to the Lamborghini museum, again no
navigational errors. Car number 02 was not in the queue to cross the
line so number 03 was at the front and we parked alongside it. We
watched the stopwatch with the intention of crossing the line exactly an
hour after we'd left Carpi, when suddenly the people in car 03 said 'you
should have gone over by now'. Apparently we should have crossed the
line an hour from our intended start time, not the actual time. So
we went over at totally the wrong time. Would we ever get the hang
of this stopwatch business?
The museum was not quite as I'd expected it. Lots of
flashy cars as you'd imagine but also lots of tractors and smaller
prototype cars. The one on the right was my favourite, it was sooo
sweet! Much nicer than a BMW hatchback!
After the museum we were left to follow the route back to the hotel without
any time controls - what a relief after the day we'd had! The blast on the
Italian motorway came as a breath of fresh air after fighting with a stopwatch
all day!
After dinner we had a few drinks and retired exhausted, dreading the early
start the next morning. We'd discovered that we were in 72nd place on the
scoresheet, below some people who were purposely trying to come last!
Still we at least had the excuse that we'd broken down that day (thanks Sput!).
