5:28 am, September 14, 2010
Us in Monaco. With Stefan. We don't know who he is. Click on this image for a gallery of pictures from today
OUR intrepid Bangers4BEN travellers have made it to Monaco – and driven the GP circuit legends have raced!
At around 4pm today, 20 bangers – all costing less than £500 – rolled into the glitzy gold-leaf lined (probably) streets of the principality.
Car Dealer’s Project Stealth led the convoy to the sound of the Top Gun theme tune and got a huge number of strange looks in the process.
Everyone made it to our destination safely with only a few hitches along the way – thankfully our very own AA patrol has followed us down so there’s been help at hand to make running repairs where necessary.
The most troublesome of the lot has been Carlyle Finance’s Audi TT (surprisingly) which put itself into ‘limp home’ mode about 100 miles south of Dijon.
To be honest, I felt like doing the same after another night of very little sleep began to take its toll. Thankfully the Audi started behaving after a little service station rest. Red Bull did the trick for me.
DRAMA
In the thick of it was Team WinWinWorld who ‘forgot’ to pay for 70 litres of fuel and were chased along the autoroute by the gendarmes – they quickly returned to pay, but only after shelling out for another three tolls to get back!
ERAC to the Future have been struggling with a few oil warning light issues – but they still managed to get to our meeting point just outside Monaco in time.
Just like in the Back to the Future films they brought a torrential dowpour and thunderstorms with them – but fortunately no lightning strike knocked ‘Doc’ off any clock towers.
Check out our iPhone video of what we were met with just outside Monaco:
Once we’d all grouped together in a lay-by we headed to the famous GP circuit in Monaco and looped around the iconic hairpin, through the tunnel and past the ‘swimming pool’ complex.
Team Swearing at Rabbits even did a loop of the casino square – and were met with a large number of raised eyebrows, as only the French can do properly, in the process.
Action for Project Stealth have included whether to have quiche lorraine or more jambon for lunch, whether to go for lattes or straight americanos and a heated debate over just what the best movie theme tune ever is. We came to the conclusion it was Axel F from the Beverley Hills movies.
After we’d driven the GP circuit and bagged some photos of the cars tackling the track we stopped to take in the Monaco scenery. It’s a mad place, dripping in as much money as you can imagine, but really quite incredible.
We saw, in the space of about 10 minutes, five Ferrari F430s, two Teslas, countless Bentleys, a Maybach, plus enough floating gin palaces to get even Roman Abramovitch worked up.
Tomorrow we’ll be taking a more leisurely drive north back to Dijon, before making our way home on Wednesday.
I’ll bring you another update on our adventures tomorrow, but if you want to keep up to date in between blogs follow me on Twitter and check the feed from teams tweeting by clicking here.
James
Pics: Dean Smith
