Thursday, April 21, 2011

Cyprus, Cyprus, Cyrpus

Here we were, in Cyprus 2003.  First time for me and I have to say this was the most twisty roads I had ever seen.  This rally was about survival and nothing else.  You think Acropolis is rough?  Think again.  Acropolis is a walk in the park next to Cyprus.  And to add on top of this, it actually got worse every year!!

I mean, the organisers usually repair roads after rallies, right? Wrong!  Not in Cyprus.  Don't ask me why cause I don't know.  I was sitting at the start of a stage, during recce, just minding my own business and listening to what others had to say... Then I hear Marcus complaining "...this is ridiculous, they did nothing since last year!"  And he was right, they did absolutely nothing.  This was the main talk of all drivers.  Ruts were getting deeper, from year to year... and our cars were getting higher.  This was funny because that year, the drivers complained so much, the next day of recce we saw a half dozen guys with shovels and wheel barrels filling the ruts with stuff... The top guys main job was now going to be digging this stuff right back out and lose time in the process... oops (keep the mouth shut next time, I guess huh?).  You can't repair ruts one day before the rally starts!  It needs to be fixed immediately after the rally, for the next year, so it has a year to harden...  Oh boy.  So, anyway you get the idea. 

I also had a little adventure with the fuel pumps.  We drove a stage and suddenly the engine started to misfire.  It was running out of fuel!  Bloody hell.  How is that possible?  The tank was still nicely loaded!  There I was driving down the mountain, on the phone with the car chief, the engine was going off in the straights and coming back on in corners!  Mysterious, huh?  No, simple.  In that car the fuel tank had a horse shoe shape.  I don't know exactly how it worked but basically there was two parts that hung around the tunnel (tunnel is for prop shaft and exhaust) and there was what they called "lift" pumps to get the fuel to the engine.  Apparently one pump was not working, and every time I turned, inertia made the fuel flow to the other side, over the middle ridge, so the other pump could pick it up...

So now the only thought was: are we actually going to make it back?  The problem was there was one more stage to do.  We presented ourselves to the time control and I thought: no way in heck this will work.  This stage had a steep uphill start and I had a real bad feeling about it.  We had to retire.  Better stop there than stop 2 km into the stage and block everyone, cause the stages are very narrow in Cyprus...

We had nothing else to do but return to service and drive another day.  Then, I got another call, somebody figured that, as the engine was now running on fumes, all I had to do was jack the car's right rear side up and let the fuel flow...wait a few minutes, fire it up and go.  So we did, we drove about 8 km until it stopped, jacked the car, waited 10 minutes, drove 8km until it stopped, jacked the car up, ok you get the point.  Nice exercise.  That was exactly what I had come to Cyprus for.

For us, our first experience of Cyprus shall be remembered as the "pump the jack" rally.  All that for a fuel pump worth a few hundred Euros. 



2 comments:

  1. That same thing happent to Janne Tuohino in Arctic Lappland Rally 2004. They stopped in road section about 20 km before service park. There was plenty of gasoline in tank but one bump went broken just like you...

    By the way, Janne's co-driver in that rally was F1 driver Heikki Kovalainen...

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