2008 Bathroom Bizarre Rally
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Schalk Burger in action earlier .....
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Schalk Burger (senior of course) of PMC (the club built by Legends for Legends) and Martin Botha won the Bathroom Bizarre rally with the greatest of ease this weekend.
The we had members from some other funny clubs taking second and third before the Baker Brothers Jaco and George nailed the S3 class to the wall.
The flying Koekemoer (not Vernon) the one that can drive a car until the brake pipe bursts -Werner - had a close encounter with a tree, and Lood de Clerq and Dewald Hatting, wnet into another tree while looking back to see what happened to Werner and Dries van der Walt.
Read all about it (and even the names of the second and third overall places) tomorrow when Rallystar will publish the stage and overall analysis!
Meanwhile here is what Christoff Snyders had to say:
…..you shouldn’t have asked!
Let us go back to Friday where it all began…..Now sit back relax and enjoy, this is really good!
It all started at the time to leave for Tzaneen about 1o’ clock. We did a check on the electrics of the golf, and discovered that the right indicator was not working. This was due to water ingress in the indicator housing, so we dried it off, sanded a bit of the rust off and on and off she went. Now the car was ready to be loaded onto the trailer. Like always, once it’s loaded, we do a indicator and light check, and now the left indicator wasn’t working on the trailer. I noticed that the plug was to blame, fixed it but still it didn’t work. After a bit of twitching at the back, they finally got it working, and we were ready to leave for Tzaneen (well so we thought…).
As we left the workshop we heard a knocking noise coming somewhere from the trailer side. We stopped and found out the wheel nuts weren’t tightened, and with the load of the rally car the wheel started buckling. From here onwards nothing else that went wrong was funny anymore. A few kilometres from the highway, the service van started cutting out. At first we thought it was a bit of dirt in the carburetor, but later we decided to pull over and investigate the problem. So out came all the rally tires and fuel cans in the back of the Kombi. The fuel pump, she was brokent. As we only had a spare pump for the golf, we decided to do a modify and fit, as we rally guys do it. Once it was fitted, it worked………but instead of pumping fuel, it was sucking fuel from the carburetor back into the tank, eishhh. Luckily there was a quick solution to that and finally we were off to Tzaneen just after 4 o’ clock.
I wont even mention the hassles we had at the toll gates because we had two cars to pay for. Ariving in Tzaneen we were all exhausted, and we havent even started racing. If you think that’s bad, hang on, it gets worse…
Saturday morning we decided to take the car for a test drive, which was normal, the car performed the best it had in months, that was until we got back to the lodge and saw that the left cv boot had shattered. So up the car went on the tressels and we replaced the drive shaft. So somewhere it must start going right, right? NO, it doesn’t.
As we were about to start the rally and I wanted to strap myself in, my seatbelts were loosened from the rollcage, meaning I wasn’t strapped in but just strapped. Meanwhile Celeste, my navigator, was looking for her timecard which we need to complete the rally, which she did not receive. So while I was getting my belts sorted out, she ran back to documentation to get us a timecard. But we forgot to check another thing, and that was to check if the odo was working, which was not, due to the wires that were broken off. Luckily with pace notes you can drive without an odo.
At last, we were through stage one, with no problems, and took 6 seconds from our competition. Then there was stage 2, with trees suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Yes we hit the tree, but luckily on the side, making a huge dent in the back door but we could continue the stage. Stage 3 was absolutely brilliant, one of my favourite stages, and will always be. Then stage 4 was a repeat of stage 1, and we got ourselves stuck on a bank, and lost about a minute to get ourselves off. Then stage 5 was a repeat of stage 2, our famous tree stage but we managed to miss it this time, only barely. Then to top it all and the final cherry on the cake was that our fanbelt snapped off on the last stage and after all had been tried to fix it with a universal fan belt, we had to throw in the towel.
So close but yet so far, and the funny thing is that next year we will be there again to try and finish it.
Regards
Christoff Snyders
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