OK not GT6 or Suzuki related but very much a Triumph thing. I've just got back from attempting the Club Triumph Round Britain Reliability Run.
Our team was using Mark Smith's 2L MK2 Vitesse, team members, Mark, Glyn Davis and myself.
Here we are at the start, Knebworth Barns on Friday (3rd October).
It all started well, we left Knebworth and headed up the A1M with Mark driving, topped up with fuel on the A1 near Doncaster and then called into the fist checkpoint at Wetherby services on the A1M.
Wetherby Services Checkpoint 1
We then set off on our way, Glynn took over the driving from this point. The route was up the A1M and A1 then turned onto the A68 and crossed the border into Scotland at 00:25am. We then refuelled again at the 24 hour garage in Jedburgh. I then took over the driving, the weather started to get much worse with very heavy winds and heavy rain showers. I skirted around the South of Edinburgh then over the river Forth on the Queensferry Bridge. We saw lots of signs that the Forth Road Bridge was closed) due to the winds) and the Queensferry Bridge was closed to Double Deck busses but not Lorries.
We continued up the M90 towards the next checkpoint at Kinross services. The wind got even worse and the car was getting badly buffeted. Then a few miles south of Kinross the car started to have problems with the rear suspension and was wandering all over the road unless we reduced the speed down to 40 - 50mph. The issue got worse. We checked into the control point at Kinross and discussed whether it was safe to continue with the handling problems, especially as we would shortly be going into the highlands in very inclement weather Mark decided to try driving the car for the next stint to assess it, but after one junction on the M90 North of Kinross we all agreed the handling issue made the car unsafe to drive so we decided to retire from the event. We limped the car back to Kinross services so we could wait in the warm and dry for breakdown recovery. We had completed around 400 miles out of the 2,000 miles of the event.
The breakdown recovery truck arrived about 2 hours after we called the breakdown services.
This wasn't how it was supposed to end!
The breakdown truck only took as about 40 miles south to a service station near Whitburn on the M8 as the driver had little time left to drive on his tacho hours. We then had to wait about 4 1/2 hours for another breakdown truck which took us down to Southwaite services south of Carlisle around 100 miles. Then the next breakdown truck took us down to Lymm Services on the M6, about another 120 miles. Then we had a 4th recovery truck to take us from there to Mark's home in Warwickshire, around another 100 miles.
Loaded on the Final recovery truck
After arriving at Mark's house and unloading Mark then kindly drove me around 70 miles onto to Knebworth so I could pick up my modern BMW that I'd left at the start/finish point for the weekend. I then had the 60 mile drive home from Knebworth. We were picked up from Kinross around 2am and I got home at around 9:30pm, so around a 19 1/2 hour journey!
We may have failed to complete the event, however, we did manage to raise over £1000 sponsorship for Parkinsons UK, so not all bad.
The last control stop on the event before the finish was from 5.24 pm on Sunday at Popham airfield which is only about 25 miles from home so I drove down there in the GT6 to cheer the teams on!
Some of the other teams at Popham Airfield
