Ramshackle Rally - Calais to Munich (Car related)

Slacker24seve... · World Chat Champion Joined: 10 May 2010 Karma :

Warning: The following is Teflonian in length. TL:DR version at the end.

For the last couple of years I'd been talking on and off to one of my mates about doing a banger rally and in December last year an 'early bird special' from these guys landed in my emails about their 2012 rallies. The one from Calais to Munich, arriving just in time for Oktoberfest was the longest and looked like great fun. We roped in another two, paid up and forgot about it until May when we realised we'd probably better do something about and start planning and buying a car.

If you've never heard of a banger rally before, the premise is quite simple: buy a roadworthy car for next to nothing and then get from point A to B via a few other countries without crashing or breaking down, with no breakdown support.

We split up the jobs, I was responsible for finding a car for around £250 that would get us round and the others handled accommodation, fancy dress outfits, ferries, flights home and stuff like that.

Turns out, you can't get much, certainly not with MOT or tax. In fact most of the very cheap stuff was taxed but a deathtrap or with one month's MOT and in need of serious work. Without the time or inclination to do any remedial work we stretched our budget to £400 and I started scouring eBay for bargains. Eventually we found this:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270615.jpg

A BMW 520I with 12 months MOT and (allegedly) 140k on the clocks. Looked sound enough, was a listing on eBay with no bids at £400 so we gave them £350 for it. It was an ex-reps car at a dealership which was then bought by the secretary and serviced there ever since. Needed a new front tyre (where my friendly local garage have lost the invoice, boom) and we changed the fluids and front pads.

We decided to try and raise a bit of money for CLIC Sargent (more on that later) and then thought a pink, Thunderbirds theme to look like Lady Penelope's Roller would be a good idea. In case you're wondering, yes, we did decide that in the pub.

Anyway, we got to work on it in the evenings after work, on those 3 or so days where it actually wasn't pissing it down:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270631.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270625.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270619.jpg

Fast forward a few weeks and we got it looking like this:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270994.jpg

The DT project on the front is mine. In a completely unrelated conversation I found out that the husband of a woman I work with makes the Spirit of Ecstasy for Asian market Rollers. They're perspex because the Chinese put LEDs under them to light them up apparently. Anyway we got one of those and sprayed it chrome.

We left Worcester on the 20th September, hoping to make it to Munich on the evening of the 25th after travelling through 5 other countries on some of the toughest roads Europe has to offer. Big ask in a car of dubious mechanical condition and fuel consumption Confused

Worcester to Calais was a lot of fun if only because driving around in a pink BMW in fancy dress gets a LOT of people pointing, waving and smiling.

The rally kicked off with registration and a few quiet beers in the charmingly French sounding 'Black Bull Pub'. The organisers gave us our rally bibles explaining rules and featuring alpine driving tips such as don't drive close to the edge to see how high up you are'. To win the rally, you have to accumulate the most points along the way by completing different challenges. There were daily challenges as well as one offs like getting livestock in your car, getting a bunny ears photo with a copper and a scenic planking photo. And one for a naked snowball fight, which has not been reproduced here. Points are also awarded for age of your car - we scored nearly maximum as we had a G Reg. As a bonus, every night in the meeting point there would be a safe with 200 Euros in it and clues along the way to crack the combination, with each attempt costing a red wristband (one per team member were issued).

Tip if you do one of these: don't be the only twats that turn up in fancy dress. Save that for the morning. I overheard one of the other teams saying of our Lady Penelope "why has that bloke come looking like Osama Bin Laden in a dress?"

Day 1 - Calais to Annecy

https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Calais&daddr=49.1061672,4.2543252+to:Annecy&hl=en&ll=48.669199,4.42749&spn=5.877648,14.27124&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.674612,114.169922&geocode=FXp0CQMdflwcAClj4_HXdT_cRzH0edKM4Nm-rA%3BFfdM7QIddepAACknNUxcQmPpRzHaPC3jtyMTSg%3BFe9dvAId6IZdACnJUQUc-o-LRzG6NAVigRZ4Qg&mra=ls&t=m&z=7&via=1

Day one started with a Le Mans style running start (there were 30 teams in total) and collecting the day's challenge on the way out. The challenge was car snooker: take a picture from your moving car of another moving car, going white-red-colour-white-red-colour and so on, in order. It was pretty tough and as my phone was the one used for this (I was a sharpshooter at the end for cars coming the other way) I have no pictures from that day. It was a good way to break up an otherwise tedious 9 hours of driving though. One team took a wrong turn out of Calais and ended up in Luxembourg though, which made things interesting. They were called Ramshackle Recovery, ironic really given that they were pissing water on the start line:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270622.jpg

Annecy was nice. Definitely a good place to take your missus, a nice pretty old town:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270997.jpg

I had a Tartiflette Savoyarde, which was decent, and a horse baguette for breakfast, which was not. We all got pretty steaming that night and decided to use the disposable breathalysers for the rest of the trip every morning. The most sober one drove first. Pleasingly we also made it out of the area without getting shot - we were in a pink BMW by a lake, after all.

Day 2 - Annecy to Bormio

https://goo.gl/maps/q3yJO

The challenge for the day was to buy 10 items, for a total spend of just one Euro. Each item had to be unique with no more than three from the same place.

This was where the real driving started. Most teams opted to go through the Mont Blanc tunnel and get there as fast as possible. We , on the other hand, decided to go for the squiggliest looking roads possible and went up Val d'Isere. On the way out We were glad we did, this was what it was like on the way up:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404271026.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404271024.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270616.jpg

We were probably one of only five cars on that whole road. Once we got in to the clouds, the visibility was about 10 yards. Spicy stuff. On the way down, I was driving and it got a faster and more open, it was an absolute hoot. On the way down, just as we came out of the clouds, we found this massive blue lake:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404271021.jpg

On the way in to Italy, coming down and out of the Alps, there were mad bikers everywhere. They are nuts., overtaking around blind hairpin bends seems to be the norm.

Then we went via Turin and Monza up to Como. Lake Como is gorgeous but word of warning: there is a fast route around it, up the right hand side on a dual carriageway, and a slower route up the left through all of the towns and villages. It is even slower if you take a wrong turn and get nearly to Switzerland like we did.

We eventually arrived in Bormio, late on and hit the 10 Euro wine immediately. Things got a little out of hand:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404271008.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296272.jpg

Day 3 - Bormio to Innsbruck

https://goo.gl/maps/YQ9Vd

After breakfast we looked out at our car, having forgotten the previous night's antics to find this:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296280.jpg

The challenge for the day was to score points using Euro coins, with Euros from different countries worth more points - further away countries being worth the most; getting a full set from 1 cent to two Euros

Luckily it was a late start and a comparatively short day. We needed the lie in because we were going up the infamous Stelvio Pass. The one that was on top gear and all that. Hairpin bend after hairpin bend and tunnels so tight you have to honk your horn the whole way through to alert oncoming traffic which included some absolutely nuts cyclists. It was good:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404270621.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296295.jpg

Heres the bar at the top. The Beemer started to struggle up there, the thin air definitely strangled some of her 120 horses and hauling 4 big blokes and our luggage up didn't help.

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296275.jpg

I did spot this though:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296286.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296284.jpg

It sounded amazing. I had huge bike envy that day. I also saw someone drop a Pan one of the hairpins though - the vast majority of the bikes we saw in the Alps were tourers and Sumos. That MV was one of only a few sportsbikes we saw all day.

It got better after Stelvio though. After stopping in Merano for lunch (some excellent artichoke bruschetta) we chose the squiggliest route and went up the San Leonardo Pass - this is a better road than Stelvio, by a long way. Its quieter with more variety and some fast open bits where you can really get a move on. We spoke to the organisers about it and they said they don't recommend it to many groups - its lack of crash barriers of any kind make it bit dicier in any kind of bad weather.

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404296282.jpg

Innsbruck was quiet and boring. The buildings are pretty though, heres our hostel:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342479.jpg

We only got mildly pissed rather than completely shitfaced that night. Not much to report there.

Day 4 - Innsbruck to Ljubljana

https://goo.gl/maps/sXWox

Best day of the whole damn thing. We took on the Grossglockner which is by far the best road I have ever been on. Its probably best if I just leave the site here, I was driving for a lot of it and not many pictures were taken:

https://www.grossglockner.at/en/hochalpenstrasse/

At the end of it was this, which was pretty cool:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342645.jpg

Then, on the Autoroute, one of our teams who we'd made friends with had a blowout at 80. Fucking scary to watch that was Shocked

but they were OK and hitched lifts with other teams. There was a lot of that, teams helping each other Thumbs Up

Then we got stuck in this for hours when they closed the tunnel:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342642.jpg

On arriving in Ljubljana I nearly killed a lot of pedestrians. Their traffic light system likes to release you directly in to an active pedestrian crossing. That night got pretty big as the beer and fags were ridiculously cheap. Most teams went on to a cocktail bar but we went to a club called Parliament which was brilliant. It was about 300 Slovenian students, an Italian ski team and then us. We taught some of them the dance to the Macarena, which was nice. For the whole of the time I was in Slovenia I also did not see an ugly woman. Honestly, it was brilliant.

Day 5 - Ljubljana to Munich

https://goo.gl/maps/YKdWZ

Driving wise, this was nothing special. We did stop at Lake Bled for breakfast though, which was pretty special:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342650.jpg

And then to Salzburg...

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342646.jpg

...where we stopped for lunch and beers at the Augustiner Brewery

And finally on to the rally closing ceremony in Munich which was the prizegiving and more drinking.

Day 6 - OKTOBERFEST

Oktoberfest is nuts. If you've never been before, the only thing I can think of that comes close in terms of atmosphere is the PDC darts, but without the darts and more drinking. And singing. But much, much bigger.

Everybody we spoke to said don't fuck about, head straight to the Hofbrauhaus as thats the 'touristy' one. Tables are booked from 3pm but if you start at 11 that won't be an issue - the beer comes in litre Steins and has to be over 6%, by law.

Every now and then the band strikes up and everyone sings a song. Nobody knows the words but heres the English version:

Ambrosia, ambrosia,
We love creamy rice,
Ambrosia, ambrosia,
Some more beer would be nice!

People will also randomly stand on their tables and down their steins - if successful the whole tent (thats about 8000 people when full) cheers!

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342759.jpg

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342760.jpg

I don't remember a lot after about 4pm. I made friends with some Australians and then I took this photo, in a different tent:

https://pic60.picturetrail.com:80/VOL1773/12435930/24199016/404342762.jpg

And then I woke up the following morning in an Australian girl's hotel room, fully clothed, with a huge bruise on my chest and covered in sick. Finding my way home on the U-bahn at rush hour was far from fun.

Then we scrapped the car, which I'm pleased to say we had no issues with and flew home.

TL;DR

If you're thinking about doing one of these, get on with it.
Spread out your costs - buy stuff over the months beforehand, not in a mad rush.
Put some money on a travelcard before you go for tolls and fuel. We spent about a grand on that.
Help out other teams as much as possible!
Expect a sausagefest. The few women on the trip will get increasingly hotter from a 4 or 5 to 9.5 by then end.
Learn a few phrases that might be handy in the countries you're visiting.
Take plenty of water - for you and the car
Don't eat horse
Be prepared to get no sleep and definitely take a few days off work afterwards
German women in Drindls are fit.

If nothing else, go to Oktoberfest!
____________________
Triumph Daytona 675 track bike + girlfriend's Honda Hornet 600
Selling a hack/winter bike for less than a grand? PM me.
Banger rallies are ace

neatbik · World Chat Champion Joined: 27 Jun 2007 Karma :

Awesome (and i dont use that word lightly).
Thumbs Up

rumppole · Trackday Trickster Joined: 05 Jul 2007 Karma :

I did the Munich Ramshackle last year. We were the batman car. My friend Ash Roberts did it this year as a large cow car.

Glad you had fun.

I'm doing the Valencia run (tomato fest) in 2013.
____________________
Sermo datur cunctis; animi sapientia paucis.