Paperjam

Coyote Rally: The Prologue

Travel // Nick // 31st October 2007

Well it’s been pretty quiet on paper-jam for a while, what with Jim being depressed, Steve obsessed with various pieces of 70’s musical techno-junk and everyone else (myself included) busy with something almost equating to real life, so a few weeks ago after a probably unwise number of libations for a Tuesday night I proposed a plan to Jim. This plan was more of a ‘this looks like a laugh’ at the start of the night, but as usual the blood alcohol level turned this into the best idea since Edwardians decided Victorians were wrong about having to hide womens’ ankles.

Two days later I had filed the necessary paperwork, despite the cold light of day, and a putative paper-jam team were enrolled in the Coyote Rally. You can check the link, but to explain, this is the kind of thing you sign up to during Rag Week and slink away from hoping they don’t notice. But today we, the paper-jam staff say NO! We will not slide shiftily away into the night. We will not embarrassedly mumble something about other commitments. We will not pay the deposit then write if off as a tax loss. We shall prevail. We shall actually do something other than sniping from our foiled-lined bunker. We shall - and this is the challenge - buy a shit-heap car on a limited budget, and drive it from Calais to Paris, Munich, Prague and Amsterdam in four days for no reason whatsoever.

Obviously for charity, as otherwise we’d just look like hedonistic (or overly rich) joyriders. Which we actually are anyway, but I digress....
It turns out that this whole banger rally thing is a little more complex than first expected. I’m not talking about the logistics of actually doing the thing - that’s easy. Just turn up with a relatively legal motor, more than one person who hasn’t been banned for doing 90 round the Coventry ring road and hope the car doesn’t spontaneously combust before you get to the end. If it does, rely on the ‘priceless’ Mastercard moment to get a flight out of there. But have you ever tried to buy a crap car that you need to do this?

During our initial talks we decided on a sensible approach. We were going to dig out our mechanically minded friends and go to a few auctions; not to bid, but get an idea of what we could get for our money. Then we might move on to narrowing down a hit-list of suitable cars, and sometime in the new year we might think about buying something (the rally isn’t until April).

Of course this all went tits up when I got very drunk last week and went on an eBay binge. Admittedly some of the cars I chose to bid on were eminently suitable, but I think even Roman Abramovich would agree that I didn’t need ten. Now anyone who has bid on eBay knows that the likelihood of you winning what with all the last minute scalping going on is relatively low, but even so you can imagine my rising panic when there were six auctions with around six hours to go that I was winning. Particularly when I was the only bidder on several. My wife was aware of the rally and our general plans, but I think she would have been more than a little miffed if I suddenly had six barely working cars to house. We only have on street parking and in a resident permit area to boot. If these had all come off I would have had;

An early 1980’s London Black Taxi
A late 1980’s Hearse
A 1975 (sort of running) Mercedes seven seater limousine
A 1989 Mercedes 230 Coupe
A 1987 purple Escort XR3i
A 1990 Mercedes 300 Coupe

I won’t list the other four I bid on as firstly I didn’t hit the reserve, but more importantly there were some even more embarrassing choices there.
As it turned out they all, far too slowly for my liking, got outbid. I was left with the Merc 230 Coupe that I was quite happy with - even got an insurance quote - but this got outbid in the last five minutes and I couldn’t bid again due to the rally price limit. All I an say is that eBay is a great way to give you high blood pressure, and possibly not the best way to buy a car, even a shit-heap. Having had this experience, I’m now hoping to calm down and actually get some advice on our rally purchase from someone who might have a clue.

Which brings me on to my final point. We currently have three team members out of a four maximum. It has slowly slid into my thought processes that it might be useful to have some mechanical knowledge on the team. Jim and I might be able to check the oil level at a push, and Tom may even know what tyre pressure we should have, but I have niggling doubts that this will not get us around our 2000+ mile odyssey.

Any ex Formula 1 mechanics up for the challenge? (McClaren employees need not apply).