Jamie Rhodes - Professional Triathlete

PARTHENAY RACE ADVENTURE: Part 3

8:35 PM, 7/9/2008 .. 1 comments .. Link

If you can remember back to Part 2, you’ll recall that we had just located Johnny’s gear and were headed back to the car. Once we made it back we packed his stuff, we got him out some warm clothes to put on and headed off to the hospital. Now that we had the Clio back and the new cable was all Hunky Dory, Jono and I reoccupied our seat in the twingo and Nicko got back into the Clio. We were off to the Hospital.

Jono had asked somebody how to get there (in French….talented man) so we lead the way with Nicko close behind. At least he was close behind…. Until of course he wasn’t close behind anymore. We had travelled no more than 500m from the race site when we could no longer see little red rocket in the rear view mirror. Surely he hasn’t stopped for another Piss!

After another illegal u-turn we were headed back to fin Nicko when we saw the red rocket half parked on the sidewalk. Nicko had a bit of a funny grin on his face before telling us that the cable had snapped again at which point our hearts sank and then we laughed a lot. Poor Johnny was waiting at the hospital and had been for some time and now Nicko had broken the car again. We quickly changed cars so that Nicko could go and pick up Johnny and then return back to see what we could do.

Jono and I once again found our heads under the bonnet on the Clio on the side of the road, investigating the mysterious snapped accelerator cable. It seemed, although had not come out until this time that when the mechanic changed the original cable for the new one, he cut it a bit short and then connected it anyway, thus making the gas pedal sit much higher than it should. Thinking that the cable was just a bit tight and would loosen up over time, Jono took the time whilst driving back to Parthenay to plant the pedal and slowly stretch the cable so that the pedal sat where it should along side the other two pedals. After time, it found its place in line with its friends and everyone was happy. That was until Nicko got back into the car and the pedal was again sitting higher than would be expected. And as Nicko often likes to drive like a racing car driver, the pedal was once again pushing against the carpet in an attempt to gain “more power”. Now, anyone with half a brain (obviously not Nicko or Jono) would realise that a steel cable is still a steel cable and that there is not much give in a steel cable should you try to stretch it. Have you ever tried to stretch a steel cable….? It does NOT stretch.

Therefore, through the subsequent attempts at the stretching of the cable, all that happened was that the special thingamajiggy which connects the cable to the engine was stretched beyond all belief and eventually gave way and the cable snapped again, but this time from the other end, this being the end that attaches to the engine and not the pedal. This left us with a bit on a predicament, in that we were still 3 hours from home, our potenital accommodation for the night had left and we now once again had a broken car. And Johnny possibly had broken ribs which we found out upon his return from the hospital with Nicko.

During the time that it took Nick o to go and get Johnny, Jono and I had been racking our brains with ideas to reconnect the cable to the engine with anything that we had in the car. We had short-listed the sourced materials from our brainstorm session and went from the “could work”, to the “could possibly work”, which were separated from the “no chance in hell” and were finally left with the “what the F%*&, let’s just try it” group. In the end, we decided that our lives would rest with two keyrings and a calliper brake pad removed from Johnny’s bike, sitting on the back seat.

A short time into our Mechanical brainstorm a nice local guy stopped on the side of the road and came to give us a hand. From what we could ascertain, he was a mechanic of some description, however all he seemed to do was take my ideas and implement them, making out as if it was his idea in the first place. After a while he gave up and headed off home to his nice warm bed and warm cup of coco leaving us Aussie battlers to fight it out with mother nature and the once loved, but now reviled Clio.

Staying in Parthenay for the night was not an option. Therefore failure was not an option, so after some time and a whole lot of fiddling and cursing we had attached the cable to the engine in a manner that we mechanically minded lads thought would last the 300km remaining to get back to Bourges. Time would tell.

But just to let you know how ingenious our contraption was created, here’s how we did it:

The cable was pulled back through the casing and fed in between the gap created in the keyring (just like you would if if you were putting a key onto the ring without threading it all of the way through)
This still left the cable a bit short to connect to the knob mounted on the engine, so we grabbed the other keyring and attached that to the first one to get the required length to reach the engine and hooked the ring around the knob
We were now left with the problem that when we applied pressure to the pedal, (although the engine would build revs) the pressure on the cable from the keyring was not great enough to stop the cable from sliding out and once again coming loose.
With this new discovery, we grabbed the brake pad and removed the bolt which would normally connect it to the calliper on the bike and placed both parts of the now dismantled pad to either side of the keyring. By then screwing the bolt back into the pad, we were able to create a clamp and then clamp the keyring together to make enough force to stop the cable from slipping through. Ingenious!!!!

Although not filling us with confidence, the contraption was sturdy and after several tests in which the cable was placed under much more forced than required to safely drive the car home (Nciko’s driving not included) it was decided that we would give it a go and if we broke down on some motorway in the middle of France then we would just laugh some more and then sleep on the side of the road and hope that that Murdock bloke hadn’t broken out prison and made his way over to Europe.

Due to his track record in the Clio, Nicko was now banished from driving the Red Rocket and Jono and I were now behind the wheel of our little baby. The love had returned and the harsh feeling from before were no longer felt.

Before we knew it, it was 12:30am and we had made it back to Bourges in one piece. To let you all know, the cable lasted us until Thursday when we took it back to the mechanic (who also happens to be a club sponsor) and had the cable replaced. We also travelled to Paris on Monday and returned on Tuesday night, adding another 500kms driven on our cable. It was felt between the group that it would have outlasted the car itself.

My new nickname was also agreed upon once we finally made it home.

From this day forth, I am to be known as MacGyver.

Peace out