So, to wrap it up…

A soggy trundle back around the M25 and along the M4 this morning, and we’re back home.

Car doesn’t look quite as clean as when we set off, but coped well. We probably all look like we’ve aged horribly, but had big grins regardless.

We hit every Control Stop within the allowed time window, followed the route as laid out in the roadbook in it’s entirety with the exception of a short stretch through Penzance where I missed a turn and went through the town centre instead of along the coast. Admittedly it was a little tight getting back to the Plough! We also didn’t get lost at any point, a couple of roundabouts were circumnavigated before finding the right exit, one or two junctions were more luck than judgement but nonetheless, we’ll consider that a success.

Problems with the car were limited to:

– The exhaust hitting the underside of the car, eventually leading to it coming off the rearmost mounts. Not investigated fully, but we think it may be slightly bent as well.

–  The overdrive’s reluctance to disengage wasn’t actually too much of a problem, as it would drop out eventually. We just had to remember to switch it out in advance, it would only stick if it was left in for a long time anyway. It actually improved over the length of the run, and was fine on the run home.

– The front wheel bearings, being nearly new, loosened slightly. Another team kindly lent us a trolley jack to use over our scissor jack (weight saving- see “exhaust”…) and Adam and Adrian tweaked them up a touch on the way back down through Scotland.

– The occasional stutter on hitting a bump got worse on the run over Dartmoor. This Adam traced to loose LT connections to the coil, a few seconds to fix (it probably took longer to unearth the pliers from the boot than it did to diagnose and fix the problem!).

– Vital fluids, we don’t seem to have used any water, oil is about 3/5 of the way between levels on the dipstick, slightly down from where we started (but is still golden yellow instead of black), no brake or clutch fluid, and most of a bottle of screenwash. I expect  we’ve lost a bit of gearbox oil as well, it might just be me imagining it but I think it’s got a bit noisier. I’ve not got the fuel figures but Ad made it 31mpg, possibly running a little bit rich but it was being driven very hard a lot of the time. Going by the amount of brake dust on the front wheels, the pads had a hard time of it too!

Will give the car a full inspection in the week, but it wasn’t giving any indication that anything was amiss.

Pretty chuffed across the board really. Oh, and we met our fundraising target on the way round as well which was great- thank you very much everyone.

Thanks for reading, and apologies for missing big chunks out, it wasn’t always the first priority to get this updated I’m afraid. Generally it was either sleep or coffee!