Iron Chef's trek from Melbourne to Cairns in an 850cc Daihatsu!!

[Iron Chef]

Hi guys, I thought this might be of interest to you!

To give you the cliff notes, I joined the Sh*tbox Rally 2012, in which participants must purchase a car for $1000 or less and then drive it from Melbourne to Cairns via Cameron Corner (where NSW, SA and Qld meet). In other words, some serious off roading!

Part of the fun is choosing a car - in the spirit of the rally, participants like to choose cars that really have little chance of making it the whole way. Cue a wide variety of old Range Rovers, Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Saabs. We even had an old Vauxhall Victor!

Because I run a Japanese car importing company was doing the run with Aaron from Import Monster, we wanted to choose something ridiculously small to make the trip. In the end, we bought a Daihatsu Move, 850cc manual, 31kW, 67Nm of torque, in fridge white, in Adelaide. It turned out the car had been stolen from the Hells Angels! (More on that, and the rest of this story, in a future issue of Performance Imports magazine!).

So here are some pics of our journey:



As I first bought it - note wrong sized tyres front to rear. Rear tyre went flat in under 24 hours.



Race-spec perspex rear window (owner couldn't find a factory replacement)



Me and the Move being famous. Also helped the Hells Angels to track me down later on.



Check out the artwork! Local street artist in Adelaide, amazing work.



All stickered up at the start line.



Resting at the end of Day 1 - Melbourne to Wentworth.



Yes we got to know each other VERY well in such a confined space...



Lunch in Broken Hill, Day 2, en route to Tibooburra.



Getting ready to hit the dirt for the first time. Man the first stretch of dirt road was vicious, lots of shredded tyres and broken suspensions.



Gratuitous outback pub shot in Tibooburra.



We were in swags most nights, this was dawn on Day 3 - Tibooburra to Innamincka via Cameron Corner.



More dirt? Bring it on! These roads were serious stuff - the corrugations were bad enough we could actually see the car flexing.



And bad enough that I went to change from 4th to 3rd and hit the dashboard - turned out the shifter cable had vibrated out of its bracket...a bit of a file and a cable tie later, all sorted. Note the colour of the dirt.

[Iron Chef]

At Cameron Corner (the NSW/Qld/SA border). Just checking fluids under the sign. Yes where it says 4WD only was the road we went down!



My pathetic planking attempt across three states.



Nearly there! In the home stretch to Innamincka.



Another pub shot - this time in Innamincka.

Day 4 - Innamincka to Windorah. Disaster struck. Dropped to 2 cylinders 30km from Innamincka (right near the Burke and Wills Dig Tree ironically). Changed everything external, to no avail. Took the plug out of cylinder 1 and cable tied it to the radiator support to reduce the drag on the motor. From there I drove the next 400km rowing between 3rd and 4th, max speed around 60km/h. An epic epic drive across some vicious terrain.



Filling up from a jerry about 30km from Windorah. Arrived at 8pm to a hero's welcome, then set about deciding what to do next.



Finally got access to a compression tester - cylinder 3 all good, cylinder 1 30psi (lol)......AND cylinder 2 45psi! Yes I'd effectively driven it 400km on one good cylinder. We figured it had done a head gasket, so we ripped off the head...watch out this next bit is nasty...check the exhaust valves on the middle and right cylinders....





Bits of valve lodged in the cat...

With no chance of finding replacement valves in the middle of nowhere, and other competitors needing parts to repair their cars, it was pronounced dead, and allegedly now resides at the Windorah town dump.

I'm happy to admit I shed a tear or two over it. We ended up buying a $400 Mazda 323 the next day in Winton so we could continue our journey, but the Move....moved me.

Next year's rally is Adelaide to Fremantle via Uluru - already shopping for another Move, so keep your eyes peeled folks.

Team Monster Chef managed to raise $8200 or so for the Cancer Council, which was a good result all things considered. As a whole, the rally raised just over $900,000!

It saddens me to think how many Australians never make the effort to really get out and do some remote driving - our country really is spectacular. For any Poms planning on doing it, let me know first and I'll give you advice on how to survive (literally) the trip.

[JoandJon]

Fab effort :)

[furkew]

Fantastic effort, and all for a good cause as well.

I would love to do something like that one day (Although taking my fourby across the simpson comes first)

Looks like you had a great time :)

[nitrox121]

awesome, niceone!

[The Pom Queen]

That's it I'm coming with you next one lol