500 people in 250 cars worth less than $1000 each drove Perth to Darwin via the Kimberlies to raise money for Cancer Council in June 2014. $1.4m was the target – $1.5m was reached.
| I learned some things about life on Shitbox Rally. |
| 1 – Mufflers are like showers. |
| You don’t really need them. |
| It’s other people who like you to have them. |
My shitbox – a 1994 Holden Commodore – dropped and dragged its muffler ’til the lads of Buddy Group 2 did some surgery and removed it. The car never sounded sexier. I now understood the term ‘car porn’. Lots of cars looked dead sexy for the this road trip of a lifetime.
2 – The Gibb River Rd is the road that time forgot.
The dust is so thick, it’s hard to safely drive over 40kms an hour.
But I wanted to ‘give it a tickle’.
When I hit 110kms an hour, the car fishtailed back and forth in the red dust like it was swimming in the desert.
I took off the seatbelt because the locking device inhibited my control of the car.
Nirvana.
I got to do 4 of these Rally Sprints for a couple of hundred metres each.
Man, that’s what I came for!
3 – Having a 360 degree horizon puts first world problems into perspective.
Nothing was more or less important than anything else.
I was free.
Free to do selfie photobombs…
4 – Buddy Group 2 is the best buddy group on the planet.
Everyone did so much to keep all our cars on the road.
Some people did a lot of valuable mechanical work.
Others did plenty of spirit-raising and love-sharing.
5 – Shitbox Ralliers put a lot of work into costumes, cars and having a good time.
Yep, this guy ended up surrounded by 5 empty cartons of beer – overnight…
6 – Shitboxes like to go swimmining in croc-infested salt water.
So do Teletubbies.
7 – Write Shitbox in the sand in giant letters – and coptercam.com.au will turn up with a 60 Minutes crew.
If only Gilligan had have thought of that on the island.
8 – Cars catch on fire for no obvious reason – and only a Crocodile Dundee knife could save the day in The Outback.
9 – Four river crossings through croc-infested waters. One was 100 metres long!
The river crossing, I mean.
10 – Where’s Wally? Day was a big hit.
11 – I wigged out when I saw a sunset.
12 – I want to thank all my sponsors – Training Experts Australia, Mambo, Hot Springs, City Gym and all the friends and colleagues who donated funds to the Cancer Council and helped make my Rally possible.
It was a Bucket List dream come true.
Even losing my camera, then yelling out the bad code word in front of 500+ people – ‘MINE’ – and having to drop and do 10 push-ups on loose gravel with my bare hands was worth it to have all these memories 🙂
I made wonderful new friends I want to keep. Buddy Group 2 was very proud to have Monsters Inc take home some trophies. I love you all very much – especially my co-driver New York journo Alexandra Petri. We met the night before the Rally then spent every day and night together. Not all new friendships survive a trip like that – ours thrived.
To give you an idea of a morning brief before driving, here’s a vid below. Shitbox head honcho James Freeman gives advice, hands out lost property and no matter how hard the generous and tireless mechanical support teams work through the night, sometimes a shitbox must be declared DOA. Here’s how it plays out.
See you all again next year xxx
