RBRR-1966-2015,stories from the roadside..

[Shed 1969]

Looking to gather as many RBRR stories,anecdotes, urban myths from the last 50 years ..feel free to post them on this thread ...anything welcome
...including such classics  as crew members eating cardboard packaging of their "forecourt gourmet meat based savoury product" without realising .....

[Jonny-Jimbo]

I'm not sure any of the anecdotes from our 2013 efforts would be printable or worth retelling. Or should be shared. Such as late on Friday night when a certain grey mk1 came past us on a sliproad, and by the time we'd got to the bottom they had disappeared from view... that was with Dad driving though...

[Jonny-Jimbo]

*2012, damn typo. Can't correct it now either.

[thescrapman]

You mean anecdotes such as people so fast asleep in the back they missed the cakes at one stop, despite the other drivers slamming doors, shaking the car, revving the engine etc etc???

And then had the nerve to ask why we had not asked him if he wanted any.

Should have chucked the evidence away..

[richard w]

Thought you'd started your own "odd years"  RBRR for a minute then Jon!

[andy thompson]

I seem to remember printing business cards at Blyth for our car and pilots in 2002 - MMG909C with James Elliott and Alaistair Clements - might have set a Red Bull consumption record that year too before its known hazards were publicised

[RobPearce]

One of my co-drivers in 2000 decided that breakfast at Land's End wasn't as important as sleep, so she took her sleeping bag into a corner of the cafeteria and lay down for a snooze.
That was also the year I replaced the Stag's alternator in the lorry park at Blyth, caught up with the pack by Edinburgh despite the developing misfire and increasingly reluctant overdrive, re-wired the electric fan in a lay-by Cornwall, and limped it home with one end of the subframe detached (spotted by another team at Fleet, and announced as "that's not supposed to be like that, is it?"). Oh, and we spent the whole weekend crawling across the car because the driver's door lock had jammed on the way to the start.

[cook1e]

RBRR 2006, my first one.

I was supposed to be co-driving in Jason Chinn's Vitesse, Jason arrived at my house to pick me up on the Friday lunchtime saying "sorry Mate, no way we can do the run, I've broke the Vitesse on the way over". His car sounded like a rattly bag of spanners (he had actually broken the crank although it was still running).

Not wanting to be disappointed we decided that we could in theory use my GT6. The car had no prep but I do keep it well maintained, I had some oil and a filter in the garage, so we changed the oil and filter, checked the levels, pumped up the tyres. The hardest thing was getting Jason added to the Insurance, it was Friday lunchtime and they weren't answering their phone, no doubt it was a Friday pub session! Anyway, eventually got through, this meant we were running a bit late, add to that the traffic on the M25 and we arrived at the Plough just as the last car was pulling out!

Checked in, stopped at the first petrol station, filled up with Petrol and made do with a couple of Ginsters for our extravagant evening meal ( we had intended to be at the Plough in time to eat!) and then nailed it all the way to Blythe Services overtaking lots of other teams on the way. We were then on track and running with the field! The trusty GT6 never missed a beat all the way round, it was thrashed throughout and still managed to return 33 MPG which is more than Triumph says it should do!

Needless to say, after completing the run I was hooked and haven't missed an RBRR since.

[Alex]

On my first round Britain my spitfire developed a misfire. It only became evident once we were already very tired, as a result we swapped dizzy caps,rotor arms and plugs.
On arrival at landsend we convinced ourselves it must be the carbs that had picked some muck up........so we stripped them. Still no change but we thought we could struggle on......onto the A30 and it became apparent we couldn't. The rain was hammering down and it was just getting worse. We pulled into a garage and popped the bonnet squirted everything with wd40,this seemed to smooth things out. This was the point we realised a brand new lead had destroyed itself in the cap. We limped to a halfords a picked up a lead,then we were flying!
Not sure what caused the start of the problem as I'm sure we'd have noticed when changing the cap if a lead had no end........

On my third my car (triumph 2000) had an Australian drive up its bottom........ The settlement paid for my mk1 though and we still completed the run 😀

[richard w]

I'm afraid that we didn't have any real dramas last year on our first RBRR, but the feeling of relief, when we thought that we were way overtime, of pulling into Pimperne and seeing a carpark full of Triumphs was huge. That was just one of many highlights though. The only low point was developing a misfire in the Highlands. It turned out to be an overheating HT lead ( nice and simple 🙂), but in the 10 or so minutes that the bonnet was up we had about 8 other drivers asking if we needed any help - taught us what CT camaraderie is all about.

Richard

[Stuart Wilson]

My first RBRR was in 2012 in sprint engine TR7. We were in amongst the first few away from the Plough no problems at all. Had a very very good run up the A68, well it is our local patch, to arrive first at Edinburgh airport. Still no problems, a steady run up to John O Groats for breakfast. Then we started to have problems as we headed towards Fort William, the car was running rough then would start to misfire. The in line filter was filthy, this was changed which helped for a short while. But we struggled on trying different things at the stops we came to. Once heading down the A74 we decided we'd give up and turn left on to the A69 and head home, but then as we approached Carlisle the car spluttered and picked up and was going like a dream, so onwards. It didn't last as we pulled in to the excellent Westmorland services at Tebay. Roadbook signed and a lot of help and support from various people got the car running better but not perfectly. We found a sweet spot in the revs and decided we'd just drive to that and see how far we got. Heading into Wales I think we were now probably last car on the road, that didn't put us off and we made up some time catching up. Then as we crossed the Severn bridge the car spluttered and backfired and ran perfectly for the rest of the trip.
2014 what can I say about last year, we decided to try and do it in my Moss Roadster. I'd got the car ready and been using it even took part in a local 12 car event, no problems other than the exhaust being a touch noisy. To cure this I modified it and added an extra silencer, all seemed good. I know people comment on the fact that we trailer the car to the start but it is cheaper in fuel coming from Northumberland and I have somewhere secure to leave the van and trailer. So when we unloaded the car and packed in what stuff we could this was the first time it had been fully loaded since the exhaust modification, yes I know basic error. The exhaust was catching the road in an industrial estate in north London, it would be wrecked on the A68 an the Highlands. A visit to Moordale Motros and we had it sorted. That was just the start, we lost headlights before Cambridge services, pulled in there and got them working, then it wouldn't start cable on solenoid had broken, that sorted off we went. Then just before Newark it ended for us serious lack of power, steam, smoke and a glowing exhaust manifold. Game over.

But we will be back in 2016 and yes we do plan to do it in the Moss, which is being upgraded so hopefully it will cope a lot better

[ferny]

My first RBRR was in 2008. It involved visiting the Mini factory in Oxford, a stop in a police station somewhere in Scotland with a cabin so full of smoke I couldn't see where I was driving and setting the record for relieving myself of a gallon of Red Bull in the middle of nowhere in Wales as a sleep deprived me was told there was a ghost on the back seat of my car watching me. It finished with my co-driver claiming I'd stolen money from him despite presenting all of the petrol bills at the same time as what was left from the kitty.

It wasn't a good RBRR.

[JohnD]

Driving through the Welsh borders late at night, there was a white plastic bag in the road.
Paying it no mind, we ran over it.

BANG!

It had a brick in it, and the impact blew a tyre.
As three people can't change a tyre, I walked back to look at the brick bag.
It had gone, vanished, no sign of it anywhere.   Must have been removed.

Those Welsh jokers, eh!
John

[RobPearce]

In 2002, when I'd run out¹ of different cars to drive, and the GT6 was off at MW for a new body², I entered that for its second go. The restoration took a while, and it came back "not running well" because the carbs were all gummed up. So I stripped, cleaned and rebuilt them, put it in for MOT, replaced the stuck brake calipers that it failed on... and finally got it back on the road with a week to spare. So when I set off to drive from Cambridge to Crewes Hill the car had covered about 40 miles in the previous four years.

The run to the start was fine, no problems. We set off up the first leg, running well, but started to get fan belt slippage on the A1. Checking it at Blyth it was obvious that four years' disuse had allowed some rust to form on the crank pulley, and the belt had been polishing it off and shredding itself in the process. Tim B very helpfully offered us a new fanbelt that he'd been sensible enough to pack, so with that in the back (why didn't we just change it? I don't know) we set off again. A few miles further up the old belt finally gave out. Interestingly, the very first sign of this was not the alternator light but rather the cabin suddenly completely filling with steam from the overheating coolant! A little ... concerning at 70mph!

With Tim's new fan belt on we continued without further incident all the way up, across and down, until the M6. At this point my co-driver (my brother) pointed out that there was a nasty scraping noise. I couldn't hear it clearly over the general din, but pulled over anyway, in the pitch black and rain, to check. The rear silencer was dragging on the road, because the hanger had fallen off. Not the rubber bit - that was fine - but the metal bracket on the boot floor. It turned out the restorer had attempted to salvage the old, rusty bracket and weld it to the brand new boot floor. Which must, surely, have taken far longer and far more effort than fabricating a new one (small bit of sheet steel, drill one hole, make two folds, job done). Anyway, my brother had a leather belt which he removed and used to tie the tailpipe to the rear bumper, in which form the car sailed round the rest of the run with no further issues.


¹Well, there was still the Spitfire, but that was a restoration project.

²Actually just a regular rebuild but hardly any of it was salvageable... apart from the windscreen frame I'd built out of scrap from a Herald in 1993, aparently.

[Hurricane 1600]

Quoted from JohnD

Driving through the Welsh borders late at night, there was a white plastic bag in the road.
Paying it no mind, we ran over it.

BANG!

It had a brick in it, and the impact blew a tyre.
As three people can't change a tyre, I walked back to look at the brick bag.
It had gone, vanished, no sign of it anywhere.   Must have been removed.

Those Welsh jokers, eh!
John

Was Vin the only on to see the "brick"
I'm just saying 🙂

[Wilfrid]

Several requests in "Club Torque" for some stories suitable for inclusion in the forthcoming book about the RBRR have brought nil responses - zilch - nothing! Now we see a load of drivers swapping stories on the Forum - Bah!

[RobPearce]

Quoted from Wilfrid

Several requests in "Club Torque" for some stories suitable for inclusion in the forthcoming book about the RBRR have brought nil responses - zilch - nothing! Now we see a load of drivers swapping stories on the Forum - Bah!

I'm not all that surprised, to be honest.

When confronted with a request for "stories suitable for inclusion in the forthcoming book" my immediate reaction is "well, nothing that remarkable ever happened to me". Actually, that was my reaction to the start of this thread. But then some other people started posting reminiscences that they probably thought weren't worth including in a book, and those stories reminded me of things I'd done / had happen. That makes it a lot easier to throw in a few not-really-all-that-interesting tales, and the thread propagates.

[Wilfrid]

Rob - I am sure we can use some of the 'not very interesting stories' which have suddenly appeared
         on the Forum! Watch that space....

[JohnD]

Quoted from Hurricane 1500

Was Vin the only on to see the "brick"
I'm just saying 🙂

No!  I was navigating and I saw it too!  And the impact woke Kevin up.
John

[Shed 1969]

2006-Red Mk1 2000
3 up all going well apart from a bit slow
Stopped at Exeter services  to help a stag with a snapped rear  damper - diverted home to pick a spare (about 10 miles away) hit a deer on the way to getting the damper,(-we also now needed two headlights!)I was in the passenger seat  so took over driving post deer kill only to see the oil light on- I asked the co-driver how long it had been on.. he said it had been flicking on and off for the last hundred miles or so on the way to exeter- he thought it was the indicators coming on randomly! . check oil; no oil! .so turned round drove past the dead deer bought 5l of oil at exeter explained to stag crew they would have to wait a bit longer for their damper..filled with oil drove home changed headlights picked up spare damper returned to Exeter service dropped off damper - NAILED  it to LE just managed to get breakfast,found problem with oil in day light - the breather had blocked so it blew oil out from dipstick etc ,cleaned out breather at dartmeet - didn't use a drop for the rest of the run - insurance paid me £400 to repair the car myself post deer incident ...forgotten all about that one!

[Shed 1969]

I can bundle all these up and put them on the RBRR blog pages http://ctrbrr.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-route.html

[RobPearce]

In 2002, we skipped most of the Wales bit, not because of any trouble with our car but...

On the way up the A9 on the Friday night / Saturday morning, we had spotted a Mk1 GT6 by the road side. We stopped to see if they needed help and discovered they were trying to reattach the rear left wheel hub. The nut had worked loose (yes, the really really tight one) and it had come off, losing the woodruff key. We did our best to help as they tightened it up as much as they dared, given the state of the thread. It wasn't enough, and as they tried to pull away the hub slipped. So they decided their run was over and the RAC were needed, thanked us and sent us on our way.

On the Saturday evening we heard that they had reconsidered, had another go at tightening the bolt, and were still going. At Gledrid, they caught up and obviously we went to ask after their progress. They were still very much nursing the car, so they intended to take the easy route rather than the Welsh windy bits. My brother suggested we should follow them, to keep them company and offer moral support for their courageous efforts, which seemed a good plan to me, too.

[Steve28]

After a bad RBRR in 2006 where lots of things went wrong and loads of things broke or stop working we decided to have plenty of spares (battery, alternator, carbs, fuel pump, distributor etc etc etc etc) for the RBRR 2008 just about everything we could need except......................... a wiper arm that came off the drivers side in the middle of a torrential down pour in the night on the motorway.

[thescrapman]

Quoted from Shed 1969

2006-Red Mk1 2000
3 up all going well apart from a bit slow

I know how you feel, and you will be getting Mk2 DejaVu next October...

[RobPearce]

Quoted from Steve28

a wiper arm that came off the drivers side in the middle of a torrential down pour in the night on the motorway.

Oh dear. I had a wiper arm break on Tessa on the 2006 run but was able to repair it with a couple of cable ties and a butt connector. One of these days I'll replace that temporary bodge with the new arms I bought...


I have a vague memory of losing a wiper arm - or possibly just the blade - on the TR7 in 1996, too, that time on the M6. We finished the run with the passenger side wiper arm on the driver side.