The Peking to Paris Rally is done!
The Peking to Paris Rally is done and won for another three years when it will all be on again. This year was far tougher than the last two previous ones that I did.
I took my 1930 Model A Ford, the same car as 2016 named Ruby but with a stronger build and it was so fortunate, I did get it right this time and spent very little time on repairs. On the first stage in Mongolia there were 40 cars out with varying degrees of repair work needing to be done.
Some cars never made it past Day 4 well before the real rough stuff emerged.
How did we do….we won our class, first place, a great achievement and came 5th in both the Category field and the European Cup. On my calculations if all the cars were in the one class, we would have finished around 15th – 17th overall. Pretty darn good for a 90-year-old car and a 76-year-old driver and 111 other cars!!!
One of the main reasons for doing so well was the choice of product that had to marry to each other and work well together. I used the following from my sponsors and am so pleased I did.
These were:
- Davies Craig Electric Water Pump, Fan & Tyre Monitors
- Penrite Oil
- R & J Batteries – Gel Batteries
- Red Devil Radiators – Oxenford
- Snyder’s Antique Auto Parts- all things Model A
To add to these, the engine was built by Ora Landis from Schwalm’s Babbitted Bearings in Strasburg Pennsylvania USA. What a fantastic piece of engineering, absolutely brilliant. It was the same build that did the 2016 P2P but with a light bore hone and same rings and pistons back in….how good is that?
All the prep work was carried out by myself and good friend and mechanic Trevor Duncan who is my mechanic on all my adventures. Great work Trev.
After 35 days and near on 14,000 km the car was good enough to turn around and drive back from Paris to Peking….I kid you not, it was.
The key to success mechanically was undoubtedly great cooling and lubrication coupled with top quality spare parts used to build the car.
More updates when Ruby arrives back in Australia in the coming weeks…
Pictures by Gerard Brown
