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2010 Energywise Rally: Day #2 & concrete boots
A team of Trade Me staff is crewing a Commodore Omega in the 2010 AA Energywise Rally, courtesy of Holden New Zealand. Over four days the team will blog about their rally experiences.
Day two of the rally has come to an end.
Chris and I have been pretty lucky weather wise with beautiful sunshine pouring on us most of the day. Just a wee bit of rain as we completed the last couple of kilometres. We were the 22nd car to leave this morning and it was a pretty chilly start to the day. Pretty nervous to start with, but didn’t take long to get into the swing of things.
We encountered some long-winded roadworks - I am sure we were sitting still for at least 5 minutes. This was about 10km out of Palmerston North so not far into the journey. It was pretty smooth sailing from there. We managed to pass a cyclist and a farm bike which was a bit of the thrill considering everything was passing us!
The Manawatu Gorge was a bit of a highlight. Once we got through the slip, it was a great chance to see what this car could do. The Holden corners like it's on rails. Very smooth, and hardly the need to tap the brake.
The Rimutakas were awesome too. The main mission was to brake as little as possible on the downward hill, and use the weight of the car to gain momentum. Worked well and car handled it! Not too much drama on the final part of the leg into Wellington. Just enjoyed the view!
Heading off from lunch at Parliament was timed to perfection! We pulled up to get the countdown only to see if tick over straight away, no mucking round idling. We caught the car that left in front of us straight away (not sure if this was a good sign or not...)
Traffic was constant until Waikanae, before it settled down and we got back into the fuel-saving mindset again. Using a whole overtaking lane to get by one truck was a new experience, and thankfully no other vehicles behind us got held up.
We arrived at the Kingsgate to Team Awesome Dragon (Sean and Nathan) who were keen to hear our stories and continue the good work set up by our quartet from the first 2 days. Good luck boys!
Our main goal was the litres per 100km, and we managed to get this down to 8.3 from the factory's 9.1. We pulled into Palmy and we were only running 2 minutes behind the first pace car - I think we're bang on with the pace cars, right on target. We also think we shaved a good 20% off the fuel saving for the day. Roll on tonight so we can see the results.
Team Concrete Boots, over and out.
Pics courtesy EECA and David Stowell (as we had some technical difficulties getting our pics through today)
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