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Mark Pickering and Dave Boddy, in Mark's Z car, are among the competitors in the 2014 Sydney to London Marathon. When time permits, Dave may post updates on their progress here.....

Here's the plan across Australia:

 
Saturday, 12 April 2014

Day 1 - Sydney to Parkes

Well, we've made it to the end of day 1.  We have completed three of the 33 stages that make up the Australian section of the rally.
The start was pretty chaotic.  They had room for only three cars max in the start area and they didn’t have a marshalling area.
 We left five minutes later than we should have and 5th on the road rather than 3rd.  Fortunately we were able to make up the time on the run to Sunny Corner (near Bathurst).
z at start start

Sunny Corner was massively slippery.  We were a little despondent after having had two overshoots and dropping what seemed like a lot of time but in later conversations with other crews it seems two overshoots was the norm and everyone was laughing by the start of stage 2, Mount Canobolas.

Mt Canobolas was fast, had water in some of the dips and was slippery towards the end.  And our wipers stopped working which made the last few km interesting!  This was fixed as soon as we meet the service crew. A plug had popped out, no doubt in one of the harder hit dips.
inside shot
The 3rd stage was Back Yamma.  40 something kms of grotty tracks mixed with high speed straights.  Rumour has it that quite a few car have got lost, missed passage controls and generally done damage. There was mud in the dips and bog holes as well as dust on the bits starting to dry out.  Little stumps on the edge of the road are near impossible to see with the sun in your eyes.

But we have survived the day and will see what tomorrow brings.  Looking forward to seeing some results

later:

results
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