Pushing the Edge
Part 2 of 2Last Thursday I told you about my attitude to life in general. This week the story continues...
We left the story with the statement: Fortunately, spectators usually watched the cars coming towards one, not the other way around!
To get the car onto the trailer, we had to remove the side panels as they were about 10mm/less than half an inch from the tarmac. That was stationary. At nearly 200 kmh/160 mph they slid along the track. Perfect.
But, not that perfect. We weren't allowed to have movable pieces on the FF, so, the panels got caught on all the slight bumps. Not so good when I'm doing 200 kmh/160 mph! So, we raised the ride height.
Driving back from Pietermaritzburg in Natal to Johannesburg, I was shocked to see the side panels flew up in the air. What the f... I immediately stopped my Ford Ranchero. Luckily, there was only one car coming in the opposite direction and she managed to avoid the bodywork. The two pieces lay in the middle of the road. As I went to get them, I saw a traffic cop driving towards us.
Let me explain, the trailer didn't have a licence (which it should have), so I used to borrow a set of discs. There were two: a Third Party insurance disc; and a license disc. I suddenly thought as I was collecting the errant two pieces of bodywork, shit, now I'm in huge trouble. The policeman got out of his vehicle and immediately extracted from his pocket the dreaded traffic fines book. I had collected the two items of bodywork and was back at my Ranchero.
The officer examined my discs on the Ranchero, and he seemed satisfied with the legality. Next, he went to look at the license discs on the trailer.
I began to sweat.
He studied the discs, and turned to me and approached me and said: "I'm going to have to give you a ticket for having an unsecured item in transit on the trailer." (Or, words to that effect...).
I waited for the next statement.
He started writing. He hadn't yet said anything about the illegal items sitting encased in the holders on the trailer.
He handed me the fine. I looked at it. Unbelievably, he hadn't picked up that I had borrowed them.
With that, he turned and went back to his vehicle and went off. He'd written only one point which was about not securing goods on the trailer. That was it.
I breathed a sigh!
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The race at Killarney (I'm in the white car on the left,you can't see any numbers and I'm wearing a white crash helmet and without the side-panels on the car), I finished somewhere in the top order.
But, on the way back to Jo'burg (about 1,600 km/1,000 miles), the event took place.
Let me explain, I'd had to top up the water a number of times on the way down. So, about an hour out of Cape Town, going up Du Toit's Pass and over it, our Ranchero gave up on me.
It was 1980 on a Sunday, about mid-morning. We were planning to break the trip roughly half-way. (Not like the merciless drive I described in my previous Robinson's Ramblings which I had to endure speeding through red traffic lights in my AlfaSud...)
We were truly stuck. Trying to turn a Ranchero, a trailer with a Formula Ford on it, was not on and free-wheeling in the vain hope of getting back to Cape Town...
Being 1980 nobody could foresee the mobile/cell-phone industry taking off around the turn of the century. I knew my friend John Brink (who lived in Cape Town and drove and raced Mini 1275), was involved with a guy who had a garage. We had left his home that morning, not dreaming we should impose on him to take us back in again, what was a few hours later.
I had to get a lift to a place which had a telephone. I imagined the call went thus:
"Hello, John, we've broken down on Du Toit's I think the Ranchy is seized because I was topping it up with water on the way down do you have your assistant who has the garage nearby your home, number... please?"
I heard a huge swear-word came down the line back at me. But, not luckily at me.
I mentally went through what we had to do:
1 Find our way to the garage with a very large tow truck
2 What were going to do with the Ranchero, trailer and race car while we waited for the garage to open on Monday?
3 Arrange flights back to Jo'burg
4 And back for me to get the Ranchy
5 Plead with the Brinks to allow us to impose ourselves
Waiting to get a lift to a telephone. Teresa Hall looks a bit miffed and so she has every right to be.
I was stunned to hear when we got the vehicle to the garage the next day, that the entire engine was irreplaceable.
"How much will a replacement engine be," I asked the guy from the garage? Dreading what I was going to hear.
"We've got a used unit." He went on to say what the cost was (excessive, particularly as the whole event was not budgeted for), but he was going to absorb a part of the cost of replacing it. I begrudgingly gave him the go ahead.
We managed to get a flight later that day. I wonder what the air hostess made of my still shocked look?
My trip to Cape Town was a bit more expensive (a lot more...) than I thought it would be.
I flew to Cape Town and drove back to Jo'burg on Friday. Luckily, with no further ado.
Yet again, I breathed a sigh of relief.
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