Welcome to Fleetwood Yak’s first blog post
From this date until our trip concludes in early September, we plan to use this blog to update our loyal followers, friends, families, and anyone who finds themselves on the website about our rally planning and eventually daily (at least we’ll try to shoot for daily) updates about our trials and tribulations as we trek across Europe and Asia. We’ll try to keep the blog honest, straightforward, and interesting and will try our best to avoid sounding like those annoying study abroad blogs. Without further ado – our first blog post: we bought a car.
Perhaps the biggest headache of the Mongol Rally is securing a car. I’ve noticed a lot of teams take pride in finding a real cheap clunker and meticulously nursing it into rally-condition. That seems like a noble way to get your wheels rally-ready, but since none of us are skilled car mechanics or live in Europe, we had to find another way. That only other way is buying one in the UK, online, sight unseen, from a hopefully trustworthy used car salesman. Thus we took to AutoTrader.co.uk and bought a 2004 Skoda Fabia 1.2L from the folks down at Hampshire Motor House.
We sent the wire transfer and said a prayer; and the Skoda was ours. She’s currently sitting on the lot and thankfully our dealer is handling the headache of registering the car and insuring it in Tanner’s name. We’re calling her “Stevie” – a hat-tip to the lead singer of our team’s eponymous band name. Maxing out at 54 HP, this baby clocks from 0 – 60 mph at a whopping 18.4 seconds. The Skoda Fabia is ideal for short trips and commutes in metropolitan areas; I doubt the Czech Skoda engineers designed this value hatchback for fording rivers in the Mongol backcountry or driving the Pamir highway in Tajikistan. Alas, one may call our car a piece of junk; but it’s our piece of junk and we will love her dearly. To quote the galaxy’s most infamous smuggler Hans Solo, “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”
Check out the pics below:
Of course, before we embark on the rally, we’ll have to tune-up Stevie to make our rig fit for the road. Since none of us are mechanics, we’ll rely heavily on a local UK auto-shop to make sure Stevie’s bells and whistles are road-ready. But more importantly, we’re going to learn how to drive stick from the right-passenger seat. While we won’t be able to practice the latter until we’re in UK, in a few short weeks, we’ll be taking our Need for Speed talents to the Chicago streets in a manual Ford Fiesta to learn how to pop the clutch, shift gears, and avoid stall-outs. We’ll have another blog post about that experience and we’ll tally the number of stall-outs by driver.
Lastly, we plan to deck Stevie out with stickers and decals. So if you’d like to sponsor us or would like your company logo marketed to 21 different countries over the course of two months – shoot us an email! More to come – here’s to Stevie and the wonderful Skoda engineers.