Hooray!!! At last the car is road worthy and passed its MOT.

Today was a leap of faith with the car, we had already enlisted the help of a Subaru specialist to get the diagnostic machine linked up to find out what was up and stopping the car from firing into life.

Fortunately the it seems only the cam sensor was not working. After about 10 minutes of prodding and generally looking for (what I don’t know) the local vermin (big bad ass Rats) had been having a good old munch on the wires.

Great! Anyway what looked like a simple wire repair turned into a full scale battle with the car temporarily winning. These engines are not easy to work on with access very restrictive.

With the replacement cam sensor in place we attempted to fire it up. Now we’d flooded it with fuel and Easy Start last time so we weren’t expecting much first off. However it only bloody well fired up first time and ran as sweet as a nut straight off!!!

Nearly killed Kieron with the fumes though.

We’ve just found out that the DVLA and Vehicle Inspectorate have amended the rules regarding kit and special one off vehicles. Previously the ruling read “where the vehicle retains the donor vehicle’s chassis or monocoque body.”. Recently they have added the word “unmodified” to the ruling “where the vehicle retains the donor vehicle’s complete, unmodified chassis or monocoque body.” which completely shafts our idea for the car in it’s existing form.

True to a scally being resourceful we can still make good with our plans. Remember the original donor car and it’s poor old chassis….

Well it means we’ve got to restore that and use it as our chassis in an unmodified state.

So disc cutters and welders at the ready!

Registration for the rally took place this evening at 7pm and we’ve received a confirmation email that we are in and registered as team number 23!

The route for next year has been announced - bugger. We were expecting the same or similar with a nice trip along the warm Med coast.

After much deliberation and stumbling to think of a team name we’re happy we finally came up with, “Mental Block”, seemed apt given our inability to think of a name.