“Do you think we should take the bootrack?” enquired Wes.

He had a point. It was 11:30pm and about half of everything we were taking was still lying around my flat instead of filling the MG. Twenty minutes later, the bootrack was fitted, we took a step back to view the fully laden car….and twenty minutes after that the rack was returned to my garage. It simply wouldn’t work to carry anything outside the car over nearly three thousand miles with some sustained high speed motorway cruising. The bootrack represented a ball and chain to the F and our fuel economy over other Cannonball cars would be reduced, leading to more refuels which in turn would mean more time stationary, and the name of the game was simply to keep going whenever possible. Thing is, we’d already reduced to a bare minimum the luggage we were taking. We each had a medium-sized holdall in the boot, along with a small trolley jack and a smattering of uncomplicated tools, tie-wraps and bodge tape, packed loose to fill every last cubic inch of boot space. Under the bonnet I’d already filled any useful space with footpump, spare oil and brake fluid, a jerry can and a few other daily-use oddments.

The boot and bonnet spaces weren’t too bad, the real problem was packing the actual cabin. We stared at the dash, centre console and parcel shelf, trying to mentally picture where everything could go. Grey plastic stared back. The items in question were only small but there was simply no where to store them. Digital stills camera, video camera, laptop for Autoroute consultations, minor items that you’d normally throw on the passenger seat or rear shelf without a second thought, now conspired together to reduce the interior space to lunar module levels of claustrophobia. The laptop eventually went behind the passenger seat which was brought well forward, GPS and digital camera in the centre console, 12 to 240v transformer disappeared under the driver’s seat and everything else went in to a small day sack that Wes then agreed could happily live on the floor beneath his knees. Extra clothing for roof-down early morning motoring was stuffed on the rear shelf.

Car packed, head down, but sleep was as far away as Morocco and I pondered exactly what it might be like driving to Tangiers and back in what was little more than a long weekend. 

Next morning as we headed for the start at Sherborne Castle, a late summer sun peeked through the pillars of Stonehenge. The next 72 hours were as big a mystery and filled me with a distracting mix of nerves and excitement. I’d been to every country we were expecting to visit, but I’d always flown. This would be completely different.

So on to Sherborne Castle, stately, bold, impressive……deserted. Where was every one? We were only the third car to arrive and parked up alongside a BMW M5 and a heavily modified Nissan Skyline. The lack of other cars or any form of opening checkpoint bothered me slightly. I was expecting something of a circus. But there was nothing, and we all just stood around comparing thoughts on preparations and possible route.

Over the next couple of hours more cars arrived, some more spectacular or vocal than others, but all conspicuous by their sponsorship tattoos. As more Cannonballers gathered, the nervous excitement I’d experienced earlier was melting in to realisation  that we were without doubt the smallest, slowest, cheapest car there. Actually the last one’s not quite true. The Chevrolet Highway Patrol car was the epitome of zero-budget motoring. Too large to survive day to day in a world of economy hatchbacks; scruffy; uncared for and cast aside from it’s public service heyday, it was entirely suitable as a Bluesmobile, along with two Cannonballers raising money by traveling as The Blues Brothers.

The Highway patrol were here to keep everyone in order.

There's a wicked grin on this Vx220

Strange bunch in an M3

Got your number!

The rest of the metal was a little hotter. A pair of Ferraris, two Maseratis, an Aston Martin, several Porsches including the Bavarian family silver - a 911 GT2, a few classy Mercedes, a swarthy all-black Jaguar XJ(R)S and a fleet of BMWs, Skylines, Imprezas and Supras, all modified beyond recognition and reasonably-priced insurance. Then there was a Skoda (which turned out to be a true wolf wearing a fleece), a Humvee and two guys in a Caterham 7. Motoring pick’n’mix.

Nice Shot of Sherbourne Castle

Some cars could be considered better than the MGF...discuss.

This Humvee made Bob & Wes feel at home.

A Caterham seven for 3000 miles...bonkers.

I felt what we lacked in prestige was compensated for in character and heritage. The German long range bombers were simply off-the-shelf executive toys and didn’t really capture the so-called spirit of the event. We were the plucky British fighter, willing to challenge their supremacy on the road and defend all things British at all costs.

A reassuringly large group of fellow F owners saw us off and I think a few on-lookers were a bit surprised by the raucous growl from the F, warning the BMW Luftwaffe and Ferrari Mafia that they wouldn’t get away without at least a bloodied nose. A short and uneventful run to Poole opened the driving and by the time we re-grouped on the quayside, the start was already a memory with all eyes turned to France and beyond.

Wes have we finished packing yet?

About to be flagged off.....

Posing for an official photo

With patriotic flags flying it's all systems go...!

On the catamaran the maritime views of England were ignored as drivers everywhere poured over maps, road atlases and Autorouted laptops, trying to decipher the road book we’d been given on boarding. It proved pointless. The level to which the it delved was beyond that of any map and suggested some difficult times lay ahead. After a brief stop in Jersey the ferry, now populated almost exclusively by Cannonballers, steered towards a dusky French coast made all the more ominous by the storm clouds hanging overhead.  With a leg start time of 19:30 French time, the first cars jumped ship and headed off in to the enveloping grey of the evening, but by the time we cleared the ferry we were already eight minutes behind them. Running in the company of a 911, the black Jaguar XJS and a TVR Griffith, we blasted away from St Malo and on to the fast, open French motorways.

Heading for Poole - and every one is a Cannonballer

Waiting for the Ferry to Poole Harbour

 Once on the wide carriageways, the big guns simply vanished in to the distance whilst the F gave it’s best and sat happy yet determined at a sustainable, rapid pace. As we headed for Rennes I simply followed the road signs and other Cannonball cars as and when they were around whilst Wes went heads-in and planned ahead. As the last daylight evaporated, light rain spattered across the windscreen with the accompanying chill in the air keeping us refreshed and awake in the open car after an already tiring day. A couple more hours and the rain increased to the point where it was impossible to continue with the roof down. Shortly after sealing the car as we swept south through a tangle of multi-lane junctions towards Bordeaux, we spotted the first casualty of the run. The TVR had suffered what we learnt later was a sheared wishbone on it’s front suspension and it sat on the roadside with a tell-tale asymmetric stance. The pack was well spread out by now so we elected to pull over and offer assistance but by the time we had, the AmD recovery van travelling with the Run had arrived on scene.

With hundreds of miles still to go, there was no time to give it a second thought and we headed off once more in to an increasingly dark night. Wes had been doing a few sums to pass the time and update our progress. The results weren’t good. Our pace at that time would get us to Algeciras literally just in time for the ferry, and we still had more than twelve hours to go with the possibility of anything happening and worsening weather. And we weren’t in the hills yet either.

As Saturday night evolved in to Sunday morning, general traffic became less dense. Any other car, either in front or behind, was almost guaranteed to be another Cannonball car and with the rain now torrential at times, conspicuous camaraderie between teams became evident with a reassuring thumbs up and accompanying lip-read query of “you ok?” between crews as we passed one another. In the early hours of Sunday the route steered away from the motorways and as the Spanish border beckoned the fast, long straights that had carried us across France turned in to two-way roads leading us up over the Western end of the Pyrenees.

Shortly after leaving the motorway we came upon another car that’d be going no further that night. At the first roundabout in over five hundred miles, the driver of a Mercedes SLK either hadn’t anticipated or didn’t expect a junction and had gone straight over it….literally. There were skid marks leading in to the roundabout where an earthy graze in the turf revealed the point at which the German two-seater had left the road. On the far side of the roundabout more skids marks implied it had briefly ridden the tarmac again before leaving the road on a second, more terminal excursion to where we found it. Firmly embedded in a drainage culvert, front wheels missing, windscreen smashed with used airbags hanging inside the cabin, it’s rear end poked improperly in to the drizzle, the fading hazard lights blinking away the last of the battery, suggesting a slow, painful death. This was far more serious than the TVR incident and we parked up, then walked over to check the Merc crew. They were fine, shaken but fine and looking a bit grey. Charitable though it would have been, we simply couldn’t hang around to comfort them. “Just stay in the car and keep out the rain before you go in to real shock” I warned as we returned to the F with Spain in our sights.

Somewhere in Spain and madness has already set in.

In Spain and with a Ferrari only just ahead

High up in the hills, no street lights and absolutely no sign of anyone else, Cannonballer or otherwise, Wes made the quiet comment “I think……..we’re in Spain” and our unceremonious border crossing was made all the more significant for being a lone car in a pack that we knew had already lost at least two. Small villages, windows shuttered and blinds down, slept on unaware of their part in our mammoth journey. The rain continued relentless, the roads becoming more and more inhospitable yet incredibly rewarding to drive. Extreme hairpins and a gradient hidden by darkness carried us higher still in to the hills and as habitation became less frequent the car sometimes added it’s own view of our apparent isolation with a grumbling engine note.

Up ahead I could see a set of stationary tail lights. After so long on our own, the prospect of meeting strangers in that remote location in the middle of a stormy night flushed me with a little adrenaline. The low, widely spaced rear lights of a Ferrari Testarossa calmed my nerves and as we pulled level I lowered the window.

“You guys ok ?” I shouted over the hiss of the wind and rain, with “What the heck have you stopped here for ?!” written between the lines.

“Bit scary innit ?” was the breathless reply. “Can you go in front ?”

Somewhat taken aback by an admission of defeat from a crew who probably spend more on tyres than I’d spent on my whole car, we led the way further up the dark, wet pass only to leave the Italian supercar floundering on the steep, tight bends. We simply couldn’t spare time to wait and before long their headlights were gone from the rear view mirror. A little further and a huge stone obelisk in a vacant gravel car park marked the highest point that evening.  I forget the name of pass now, it’s title was irrelevant anyway, just a dark road in the rain, but the marker beneath it declaring “1389 metres” brought home the magnitude of the previous few hours. The drop down the other side was as simple as the climb had been challenging and before long we were established again in a high speed cruise on the first of the Spanish motorways that would see us all the way to the next ferry. One of the Subaru Imprezas kept us company for a while but before long we left the motorway for another refuel. These had become a set routine by now. Wes would go off and answer any call of nature whilst I filled the tank, then I’d do the same whilst he paid for the fuel and restocked the Haribo and Red Bull that had become our convenience-orientated staple diet. We could usually be replenished, relaxed, refuelled and mobile again in under 10 minutes.

Re fuelling after midnight in Spain

But not this time. Three other cars were waiting at the  pumps, an MR2, a Supra and a Skyline. If I hadn’t been quite so tired I probably would have noticed sooner that no fuel was flowing and one of the drivers was banging an open palm on the locked glass door to the forecourt shop, the dull clang of toughened glass booming across the quiet forecourt.

“WAKE UP! WAKE THE F*** UP! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE UP!”

After several minutes a weary Spaniard, somewhat bemused by four British cars all appearing at once at 4am, shuffled out in to the misty night to dispense fuel, having fallen asleep at the cash register. A few other cars carried on past the petrol station as we waited and it was comforting and rewarding to suddenly be made aware that may be we weren’t quite the underdog we’d assumed we were and were still up there with the rest. Fully fuelled once more we sped off along miles of empty Spanish motorway through countryside that even in the narrow beam of the headlights was becomingly visibly more arid and dry.

            Daylight started spreading across the landscape to our left with immaculate timing. We were both feeling the effect of a lengthy night in the hills, and the new day served to both encourage us and wake us up. I should say at this point, although the drive was demanding and long, at no time did I ever feel genuinely weary whilst at the wheel. True, when we stopped for fuel it did catch up with me but all the time we were moving, I felt fine and we did cover a vast array of subjects in the conversation, carefully engineered to keep us alert mentally as well.

            As early morning turned to midmorning, Wes’s maths came to the fore once again and he’d calculated in order to make the ferry we simply had to shave some time off somehow. We were already travelling as fast as I was happy to push the car for a sustained period, so he looked to the map and steered us away from the stated route through another hill section, staying on the bland motorways around Granada.

            Algeciras started to appear as a destination on the road signs and encouraging though it was we still had several hundred miles to go. A little later and the other Ferrari on the Run joined us for a brief period, including a short stretch where we crawled politely past a Spanish Traffic Police car, but again fuel came in to the picture and the Ferrari left the road for a petrol stop. Whether or not we could make Algerciras on the fuel we had was a real fifty-fifty call. We were now very tight on time, yet the fuel state was getting low with the needle nagging the red section of the gauge. But to stop for fuel, we’d risk missing the ferry. It was that tight.

Waiting for the Ferry to Morocco

            After the next road sign showed Algerciras as being less than a hundred miles, I decided with a full tank I’d then have sufficient fuel and confidence to up the speed and compensate for lost time during a final push for the ferry and we briefly left the motorway once more. The significance of this decision was all swept to one side though when we received a phone call to say the ferry had been brought forward by twenty minutes. After one thousand miles of playing beat-the-clock, and with just under an hour to go, our timings, Wes’s faultless navigation, our slick refuels and carefully sustained cruise speed were all useless.

Wes took the call and based on what he heard figured we might as well take it easy for the last fifty miles. I only heard one thing though - the ferry times have changed - and I took the view that we might as well push on sticking to our original timings, since we’d only know for sure the ferry had departed early if we got to an empty quayside.

            By early afternoon we basked at the docks under a hot Mediterranean sun. In front of us a dusty Porsche 911, last seen in St Malo, behind us the charcoal grey Audi TT, everyone clearly relieved their world had slowed down for a while. Car doors were swung wide, drivers stretched legs tired from a day driving, and for a while at least we were going absolutely nowhere. At the front of the line the first to arrive in Algeciras were riding up the ramp to the ferry for Tangiers and it would take a few minutes for them to load.

            In just over 24 hours we’d crossed the English Channel, travelled 1173 miles, climbed over 4500 feet, used three tanks of fuel……..and made it.