Tunachuckers Can-O'-Blog

On Friday afternoon, I was (finally) flying back home from Chicago.  Apart from the ill-fated 24 Hours of LeMons race the prior weekend, it was the first time I'd been back in the Southeast in 2 weeks.  I was tired.  I was cold.  I had had my fill of sausage.  And I was ready to spend a night or two in my own bed, eat dinner at my own house, and see my girlfriend (who would hopefully still be) and my puppy.

But first I had to deal with a 2 hour flight, luggage carousels, rental cars, and an impending South Carlolina February winter storm.  To pass the first 1/4 of the time, I had a book I was intent on finishing.  (Airplanes are excellent for that.)  The book was Barry Lloyd's "You Can't Get There From Here", a humorous retrospective on the salad days of rally racing in Austrailia.  I'd recommend the book with high praise, except I'm not sure where the heck you can buy it stateside.  I happen to belong to an Australian car club for Mitsubishi Colts (one of the cars Lloyd writes about driving) thanks to my somewhat impromptu purchase of a JDM 1967 Mitsubishi Colt Wagon about a year ago.  And the head of said club somehow managed to get his hands on a few dozen of these books, and had them autographed by the author.  One of which made their way into my mailbox.  I'll say it straight out: it wasn't cheap.  In fact, for this 150 page paperback novela I paid more than I've paid for any hardback tome.  But, exclusivity has its costs.  And the book was worth every Austrailian penny I paid for it.

So I was finishing up Llyod's work on the flight from O'Hare to Charlotte, and near the end he relays an experience he had rallying Colts in the Outback in the late 60's.  Sometime after starting the race, the drain plug on the Colt's differential unwound itself from its threaded home, dropped out onto the rally course, and proceeded to allow a gusher of diff oil out onto the course.  As the engine was turning somewhere north of 7000 RPM, and the car was bounding over gravel and hard-pack, the loss of the plug and the resulting rear end noise went unnoticed until the spider gears themselves locked up and the car skidded to a stop.  It was night time, and when the driver and co-pilot got out to look, the diff housing was glowing red.

Luckily for them, their teammates' car (a similar Colt) had just thrown a rod bearing, so they simply swapped the axle out of that car and into the one they had been driving, and went on to finish the race- a feat that the fledgling Mitsubishi Motors company thought mighty impressive.  A feat that led to Mitsubishi becoming the dominant force in rallying that it has been since the 1970's.

Knowing we weren't the first morons to lose an oil plug in the heat of competition eased the pain of last weekend's debacle a little.