LIVING THE DREAM THE PEKING TO PARIS—PART TWO
Peking to Paris is the ultimate classic car rally, not just for its impressive route across the world’s broadest land mass, but because the roads barely exist for thousands of kilometres. It’s a true test of a car, its preparation, and the driver’s grit and determination. In the first part of this two-part series, published in our last issue, Garry Boyce and co-driver Ken Williams set off from Peking, learning what bits of Garmin’s guidance to trust, and just how tough the roads, or tracks, across Mongolia could be. When the ‘road’ got too rutted, like the locals, they just drove across the desert alongside the old road and made a new one. However, they still experienced sudden drops and ditches that buckled the 1964 Mercedes 220 SEC’s belly pan so badly they had to panel beat it — twice.
“It might be fine for New Zealand conditions but it was totally inadequate out there,” was Garry’s verdict.
In this issue, Garry and Ken forge on into Kazakhstan and back into Russia, where it gets even tougher.
Now, over to Garry.
No relaxation
Our second ‘rest day’, as they call it — everyone spent most of the day working on their cars, so there was no rest — was at Novosibirsk in Siberian Russia. The oil I had in the car from New Zealand was 10W40. It was getting hot, and we had very low oil pressure at idle, so we went looking for a better oil grade: preferably 20W50 but at least 15W40. We set off at 8am to a couple of addresses we had been given but were not successful. As we were driving back to the hotel to see if we could find a better contact, we passed a garage workshop that was just opening its doors. I said to Ken, “Let’s just go in there and see if someone could direct us to a supplier of the oil we need.”
They looked at their computers for about 10 minutes, then said they could have eight litres of Bardahl 15W40 delivered to them in two hours and that we could use one of their hoists to do the work.
Just next door was the Nürburgring car wash, so in we went for the full works. They noticed the ‘Nürburgring’ transfer on the back of the car — I drove the car around the ’Ring in 2006 — so they were very excited and gave us the wash for free in exchange for a photo in front of their business. The oil turned up at the garage on time. We had the car on the hoist,
