Porsche Euro Trip Intro

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Every year for as long as I care to remember my best mate from back at school and I have travelled down to Le Mans for the 24 hour race (as well as more recently for the Classic). The journey always involves winding down the D roads through France in whatever fun car one or both of us owned at the time finding the best roads and routes. Over recent years we have been joined by two other friends, Jon a fellow Porsche owner and drinking buddy and Paul a friend of Jon and I from the pub. Four makes a perfect road trip group. Two cars, two drivers and two passengers/navigators.



Every year around the “camp fire” of empty Kronenborg stubbies we had discussed doing a big road trip like the one Jason and I had done to Gibraltar years previous in Caterham 7s. Last year’s race we decided that was enough of talking and we would do the trip in 2015.



I set up a joint account and everyone paid in as and when they could, either by direct debit or one off payments with the view of getting £1500 each in there by February so as to avoid a big hit in one go. I did some basic budgeting and worked out that over 18 days we would spend £6000 on food, petrol, hotels, camping, etc. between the four of us. I plotted a rough route that would essentially take us on an anti-clockwise route around western Europe, taking in the best of the driving roads, sights, and car related destinations there was on offer. Initially we were to tag Le Mans on to the beginning or the end of the trip but soon decided that Le Mans is really the Wednesday to Monday, not just 24 hours so unless we were going to try and get a month off, we were going have to give it a miss. Once that was decided it was suggested; why waste the first 900 miles doing more or less what we did every year just to get to the Pyrenees and wouldn’t it be cheaper/quick to head straight to Northern Spain by ferry.

With brownie points earned by sending the wives off to New York at Xmas as a treat we were game on. Even Jason’s wife Claire falling pregnant and giving birth to Sam just before Xmas couldn’t stop us! We didn’t however count on Volvo launching the new XC90 in the middle of June and Paul (who sold them for a living) was given the ultimatum by his boss of his job or the trip. As such we were down to 3. We had said “one out all out” but decided that we wanted to go more than we didn’t want to do it with just 3 of us. Budgets were recalculated, ferries rebooked and hotel reservations changed. This had the effect of increasing the budget to £1900 per person but what the hell!



The final agreed route was Essex to Portsmouth for the ferry to Santander in northern Spain. Down the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, into France at the Mediterranean, up towards the French Alps, down the Route Napoleon into Monaco. From there it was round the Italian coast and inland to Modena/Maranello to visit the Italian car factories, north to Lake Guarda for a mid-way-down-day and north over the Alps into Germany. Once in Germany we would do RUF, Mercedes, Porsche and the Nurburing, nipping over in to Belgium to see the Spa circuit. North again would take us to Dinslaken to visit David, the chap who had owned my car for most of its 26 years, before heading to Hook of Holland for the overnight ferry to Harwich and home. This itinerary was agreed to be flexible so we could adapt and make the most of things. The cars were to be my 1989 3.2 Carrera Sport coupe (Ruby) and Jon’s 1996 993 Targa (Tara). Jason was to navigate and he had spent many an hour researching fun roads on the proposed route. Inter-car comms was to be dealt with by walkie talkies. We had a final planning session and pre-pack a week before where all the camping gear was optimised and spread between the cars, tools/provisions were chosen, cars were clean and we were ready for the off. Previous to this Jon had got someone “professional” to look over his car whilst I had decided to avoid the Pros and remove the engine and gearbox on my driveway to change the clutch! A job that I had never done before and I hoped would not jeopardise the trip in any way. Little did I know that the clutch/engine/gearbox perform perfectly and the problems we were to encounter were all related to things I hadn’t seen fit to deal with.



On Friday 29^th May at 12.00 we were off!

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