Peak endurance

It was almost exactly 12 hours since we’d left that morning. We’d done 18 mountain passes in that time and now I was homing in on a beer from the mixed collection on the table at our finishing point. With bottles brought along by all of our rallying compatriots, I picked one from Belgium and turned to Paul, who’d been in the Trident V6. “So you had a bit of trouble then?” I asked. We traded stories; his of a loose driveshaft and mine of my alternator woes. “How come your shirt isn’t nearly as filthy as mine?” he queried. I had taken it off to replace my coolant hose, I explained, so my pale yellow 12in12 shirt was mostly intact.

I then got talking with Jed, the younger of the father and son team behind the Alfa Romeo Spider’s remarkable progress; they’d arrived here first. “We only had one little moment,” Jed said, as I asked about how they managed 21 passes in 12 hours. “It was down one of the longer passes. We just locked up. There was a van coming the other way and we were headed straight into his path towards the edge of a hairpin