Gumball Writeups

At 14:00BST today on Pall Mall in London, UK, the Union Flag dropped and the Gumballers started their 3000 mile journey, with their first stop being Waterlooplein in Amsterdam where they are expected from 9pm onwards. Read the rest

Steve just published his amazing writeup on probably the most unlucky Gumball experience ever. Denied access into France at least 3 times, then travel around the country to find alternative entry points into Continental Europe, in the end decide to go back to London, end-up in Brixton, nearly get car jacked – twice – and when they finally arrived at a Porsche dealership they rejected to look after the $ 400.000 Carrera GT, so they left it in the streets of West-London… The story reads like a small novel!

I am typing right now on a laptop on a boat on the Bosphorus Sea in Turkey, the Blue Mosque as backdrop…Surreal…as is evertying about this adventure. As you will understand soon, we are renaming the car from “The Beast” to “Handbasket”, because we certainly went to hell in it. Months of details and preparation should have mitigated the risk of disaster, or so you would think, but fate had different plans for Team Warrior Heart car “lucky” 13. The definition of “Warrior Heart” is to live life directly, its pains and limitations, its joys and possibilities. The universe decided Gumball was the perfect place to test that out and put our money where our mouths ware. We were supposed to receive a legally accepted front plate “sticker” for the Carrera GT, so Steve didn’t have to drill holes into the front of the car. Inexplicably our provider avoided us for 3 days as we heard “its coming” all the way till we were in queue ready to take off…in the end we were provided with our license plate details on cardboard paper taped to the front of our car. Some last ditch efforts to get the camera recording setup in the car worked…and with moments to spare, the incar LAN was humming like the 605 ponies waiting be unleashed. And…This is when it all started to go wrong… (You will notice lots of “…” in this post as everything is a cliff hanger. It just couldn’t get any weirder!)

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Team Fast Car (car 100) is back in the UK. Glenn Rowswell and Jamie Burr only drove to Hahn Airport. Here’s their full story:

Just to let you guys know that Team Fast Car and the Nissan Skyline Tokyo Highway Pursuit car are back in the UK. We were initially down just for the first leg, but after problems in Germany we were ordered by German Police to take the plane to Istanbul and leave the country immediately. Otherwise we faced the car being impounded (possibly crushed) and being locked up if they saw us on German roads again. After already being fined 420 Euros, we knew this was more than just an idle threat.

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Team Stuff returned to the UK yesterday after an exhausting first leg of the rally. Apparently they only entered the rally for the first bit. We collected some of their highlights of the the rally:

Funny stories:

“As soon as we pulled in we were mobbed by a coach load of teenagers, demanding stickers that we didn’t have. It was brilliant to see how enthusiastic they were, but slightly unnerving when we lost sight of the service station in a sea of grinning faces and flashing cameras. They would have ripped the clothes off our backs in a second. Fortunately we were saved by the arrival of a Gumball Porsche and Bugatti Veyron – the latter a welcome sight at the best of times!”

“Nope, we haven’t crashed. But it seems that Amsterdam has. We received a message on our CoPilot Live 7-toting MDA Compact III saying that the town centre is closed due to overcrowding. A few of the speediest cars made it in before the curfew was imposed, so we blame our ultra-officious customs officer for causing us to miss out on the Queens’ night fun. And we will never forgive him.”

“When we pulled in, a German traffic cop said, ‘ze game is over for you now’ (absolutely not a joke) and directed us round to a car park full of our old friends from Pall Mall.”

You can read all their stories here.

So my story concludes. Mussy will hopefully add some of his adventures and comments later. It is a bit long-winded (ie I ramble a lot), but it was to make up for not driving from SLC to LA! Regards to all and see you next year! BalkanExpress

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