The King of France locked by ARB 2024 was held at Chateau De Lastours in the south of France. After a gruelling 25-hour journey to get there, and a stopover at a truck stop we were met by the beautiful scenery of mountain ranges covered with snow and mist on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other. We are happy to report that our trusty support vehicle didn’t break down at all for the whole journey!
Mistress was her mischievous self as always, giving us gearbox issues. We could get 1st and 2nd gear, nothing in 3rd and when we hit 4th she went back into 1st gear! After stripping everything down it became clear that it was an electrical issue, and we found it. When we were re-fitting the harness the new rubber seal on the plug was pushing away and stopping a good pin connection. It took a while to find but after testing everything seemed to be ok! She flew through Tech and Contingency so the next stage was the Prologue.
During pre-running, all was going great and suddenly, for no apparent reason, the car just cut out. So Jim and Helder got out to check the starter motor feed and that seemed to be correct. We pulled off one of the guards and checked the starter motor and the kicker wire had come off, we put it back on and off she went again with everything seeming fine. All of this an hour before the start of the Prologue!
The Prologue consists of 2 stages, a day and a night stage. Being the current European Champions Team Gigglepin were first off the line, which gave us a great advantage as we had a fresh track and no one else's dust to battle. However, slight issue, Jim didn’t realise that there was a night stage and hadn’t fitted a light bar! That meant that we were going to have to steal the light bar off the van (which happens to be a perfect fit) depending on what time we were to start the night stage.
After the 1st stage of the Prologue, we were sitting in 3rd place, a mere 0.1s behind Reulsport who made 2nd place and The Crazy Germans leading the pack in 1st. During the 2nd stage, it wasn’t dark enough to need the lights thankfully and we managed to get an overall place of 2nd place for the main race, starting alongside The Crazy Germans who had managed to squeeze into 1st place ahead of us.
On the morning of Race Day 1, all seemed to be going well, we were crossing our fingers hoping Mistress would behave herself as we had 6x 20km laps in front of us. The course is brutal, it’s a very technical course with some steep rock climbs and some very fast sections where we can reach over 100 MPH. Our biggest challenge is tyre degradation and fueling, the Reul brothers are running a diesel, is that going to be an advantage? Well, we were about to find out.
Starting in second position next to The Crazy Germans we planned to take them in the first 3 corners and push them, but that just didn’t happen. We drove very intelligently, let them stay ahead of us and just let them go, this way we were able to stay out of their dust and make our own race pace. After about 10km on the first lap, we managed to pass him as he had a flat tyre which meant we had a clear vision without the wake of his dust.
We were in the lead!
The first lap ran really well and we got our Joker lap in at this point, during lap 2 however we started to notice our temperatures increasing a little bit, so we put in some management and managed our fastest lap of the day. The third lap was going well, making a good pace and then disaster happened, our prop shaft centre bearing decided to disintegrate and that left us in two-wheel drive. Helder jumped out to retrieve the front prop shaft, took that off, put it away in the car and off we went in true Trophy Truck style two-wheel drive.
At the end of lap 3, we came in for refueling and quickly got back out on track, still in 2-wheel drive and trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Then we started to get gearbox woes again, we carried out pushing through and managed to bring her home, completing all the laps for Race Day 1. We were sitting in 18th position because we got some penalties, which we were really not impressed about because we had done nothing wrong. We knew exactly where they came from as there was one section of track that was poorly marked, we did have a meeting with the race runners and the marshalls to discuss this with them later that evening as those who went the correct way were right but also those who went the wrong way were also right.
In true fashion, we fixed the prop shaft centre bearing and when we went to start the car it wouldn’t start. We found a broken wire on the camshaft sensor. We will not surrender, we may be in 18th but there is still another full day of racing to go! We were a long way behind, around an hour and 40 minutes, but hey we are going to go out and chase down the leaders to knock them down a peg or two.
At the start of Race Day 2, we had no 4th gear or reverse, sounds like a familiar story… didn’t we lose reverse gear at The King of Hammers earlier this year?
Who needs reverse anyway, it is of course the “Cowards Gear”.
Not having 4th though is a slight problem as we couldn’t reach full race pace, but we were determined to have a good time and to finish the race. With 5x 20km laps left ahead of us, it was going to be a tough day. We made up from 18th place to around 10th on the first lap, and we made it up until about 7th overall; however, once the official results came in we were in 12th place.
The important thing though is we finished, yes we are finishers! To have that medal at the end, despite all the hard work and drawbacks means the world. The race was tough, the racers were another level and we loved every minute of it.
None of this would have been possible without the support of our team who travelled from all over Europe to be with us, Helder from Portugal, Brian and Thomas from Malta, Michael, Sam and Darren from the UK and of course the lovely support from my better half Jen. What a journey!
We hope you enjoyed the livestreams, it was our first attempt to bring you live coverage from the track and it can only get better. We are making a few changes to it for our next event in Breslau, which promises to be a lot wetter than France. Check out the streams, best bits and photos from our journey below and thanks for being part of Team Gigglepin!
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