We had had just about a week with no mechanical problems and had started to presume that getting to Paris was just a matter of filling up the car with petrol from time to time.

 

But it turned out that this was not to be the case.

 

About 50 miles into our route today the engine suddenly died.

 

We had started unpacking the car to find our electrical spares, packed at the bottom because they were heavy when Mike said ‘I have an idea’. And he changed a fuse. And the engine started.

 

So we repacked and drove on. For about 500 metres. And the engine died again. We changed the fuse again and it went for another while and the second fuse blew. So we put 30 amp fuse wire in and got a kilometre, just into the middle of a town square, when it died again, this time with a smell of burning and some blue smoke.

 

We phoned the ‘sweeps’ the brilliant mechanics who follow us around. Meanwhile Mike changed the coil, which turned out not to be the problem. After we had unpacked again….

 

Eventually the sweeps arrived. We were lucky that one of them was Jack, who has owned a Bentley not that different from ours and who is often the man who can fix our problems.

Fig 1 Mike and the sweeps fixing the car

It took him 20 minutes to work it out and 20 minutes to fix it. Pretty amazing.

 

In the UK we had put an extra wire to the fuel pump so we could keep going on the battery if the other electrics failed. This wire had moved and was now shorting the system.

 

The leads to the fuel pump were fried. Jack and Russ replaced them.

 

So we repacked and got on our way.

 

We missed time controls and lunch. And have dropped a place in the ranking.

 

But according to rumour, we are now one of only 25 cars to have driven from beginning to here in Stettin under our own steam!

Fig 2 Thirty seconds after the latest rally results have been posted……

 

Stettin has had an Interesting history. It was of course the northern pole of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended on Europe’. And with Gdańsk was one of the two founding places of Lech Walesa’s revolt against Communism.

 

Today it is a rather calm and beautiful city, relaxing after so much turmoil.

 

Like us this evening after an eventful day.