Diary, 16th and 17th of July, 2009 - Final Preparations in Warwick

Today was the first day preparing the Subprime Micra. Oskar, Peter and I woke around 6:30 and piled into Oskar's £250 Ford Transit and bounced down the M40 to Prodrive at Warwickshire. After leaving Pete at Prodrive for his last day of work, Oskar and I drove out to Halfords to pick up a few parts for the Micra.

This was my first taste of driving the Subprime Micra, and I have to say I'm quite impressed. Around town the 50bhp 1 litre motor is surprisingly willing, giving perfectly usable performance up to about 65mph. The handling isn't too bad either, though there's a bit of body roll through the bends.

After picking up the parts we drove down to the Warwickshire College workshop to get to work. Ian Newstead arranged free access for us to use the workshop for a few days, and we can't thank the guys there enough. Preparing a 10 year old, £900 car to drive 16000km, including some of the roughest roads on earth is a pretty big deal no matter how you look at it, but when you've only got about two and a half days to get it done in it's almost impossible - so getting use of a fully equipped workshop was a lifesaver. Jim and Mic and the rest of the guys there not only put up with our dodgy Australian banter and unconventional work practices, but Jim stayed back until about 8:30pm on Thursday night. Absolute champion, even if he's backing the wrong team in the Ashes.

Since Warwick's a pretty decent drive from Reading, we'd planned to spend the night in Oskar's Transit. After much discussion about the best place to sleep without attracting police attention, we started setting up for the night near a small shopping centre across the road from the workshop. Naturally, just as we were getting into our sleeping bags two police roll up behind us in their Astra. Luckily for us, they weren't interested in moving us on, but were looking for a missing 15 year old girl. After wishing us a good night they continued the search. Hopefully they found her.

Friday morning we headed to Coventry on an abortive mission to get tek screws for fixing the power inverter in the car and other small items. It seems like tek screws just aren't used in Britain though - after checking three hardware stores and coming up empty handed, we bought some food at Morrisons and drove back to Warwick for our final day of car preparations before the Festival of Slow at Goodwood.

In the end we managed to get through a complete service, fit a set of high-profile van tyres, raise the suspension an inch front and back, fit bash protection for the sump, transmission, brake lines and fuel tank, as well as fitting new brake pads and rotors to the front and extra protection for animal strikes up front. Peter and Oskar had previously fitted a roof rack and kill switch, so with an average of about 3 or 4 hours sleep a night over the last few days, we're almost ready for the rally launch at Goodwood on Saturday morning.