5:34 am, October 12, 2011
HMS Ark Royal’s journey back to Blighty has been saved by some Bangers4BEN team spirit!
Since we broke down on Saturday, countless numbers of people on Twitter, and in real life, have been trying to help us – and it seems they have just succeeded.
Fortunately for us, parts company Klarius is along for the B4B ride and they’ve been working flat out to find us an alternator for our stricken ship.
This morning we got the call we’d been waiting for – they’d found one, just 200 metres from the Ferrari museum we were visiting before setting off back to base.
Baggott hot-footed it to the auto factors and in pigeon English, spoken really slooooowly, managed to buy the part. Sadly it wasn’t in stock there, but was just down the road in Modena.
The BEN team offered to collect it for us, just in case Team Hyundai we were hitching a lift with broke down, and a few hours later we got the call it was on board.
Now we’re back in France and the legendary AA patrols have managed to get the Mighty Ark back on the high seas. They had the new alternator fitted in a matter of minutes and it’s charging up the battery perfectly.
Fingers crossed tomorrow it manages to get us back to the dockyard.
ROAD TRIP
While our part was being transported back to France we caught a lift with Rob and Wags in the luxurious XG again… but sadly our jinx seemed to have followed us and has afflicted the Hyundai.
Just coming out of Maranello the luscious XG developed an alarming wheel wobble.
It became so bad we had to stop fearing the worse and using the combined knowledge of Baggott’s ignorance and Wags’ mechanical know-how we diagnosed the problem as a brake pad sticking.
The pair intend to carry on back to England using an ingenious solution of weaving side-to-side on motoways to free the brake pad. Who says the British aren’t clever?
