The Result

The Red team made it round ½ the course, they missed the down ramps on the lorries and broke the oil filter, lost all the oil and had to stop their engine. We were a long way ahead at that time but didn’t know and at the end we were in full panic mode to try and turn the car over thinking the red team were going to appear at any moment.

The Blue team had a problem with fuel starvation, burned out two fuel pumps, and didn’t make it much further then the start line.

The other teams.

The other teams: in Red were Danni, Piers and Andy. In Blue were Dave, Dave and Jamie. One of the things we noticed in the first series was they tried to get three groups of people, a team of wise old sages who could build anything from anything, that was us, Adrian called us the old farts team, up until that is Marc pointed out to him that he was younger than Adrian!

The red team were young, keen and inexperienced, so inexperienced that they had only learned to weld in the few days before the filming and I’m fairly sure that none of them had done any serious engineering on this sort of scale. I think they surprised us all with what they achieved, they took an old Sherpa van, shortened the chassis and then mounted a Metro upside down on top. Sure they had some help, but most of it was their own work and for jumping in at the deep end they did very well. Funniest moment was when Piers exclaimed how happy he was having finally cut through one of the Metro’s drive shafts, it took him ages, We pointed out to him it would have been quicker if he had used a cutting disk rather then a grinding one!

The blue team were a mix, the two Dave’s as far as I know had done a fair bit of work but again nothing on this scale, Jamie was a motorcycle mechanic so he was the experience in the team. Their car was an Astra GTE again with a Metro on top, in simple terms they cut the two roofs off and welded one on top of the other. Their main role was clowning about, Dave must have been practicing, as I’ve never seen anyone do a Moonie in a boiler suit, any excuse and out came his arse for the camera!

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