Meet Eleanor.
Eleanor Classic Car, 1941 Chevrolet Coupe
Welcome to our first blog for the 2024 Peking to Paris Car Rally. Below are details of how you can follow us for further updates. For now, I am delighted to introduce you to our wonderful rally car Eleanor.
Named after Eleanor Roosevelt, we wanted to name her after someone who was hippy and sassy, and beautiful in a non-standard way - and so Eleanor she is.
Eleanor in her grey livery.
We bought her in 2017 through Rally Preparation Services in Witney, Oxford in preparation for our first Peking to Paris adventure in 2019. Simon Ayris, the owner of RPS, had her for sale from some previous clients. She had done the rally before, in 2016, and was painted grey.
As we were talking through with him about the car and also what needed to be done to make her ready for us, I asked him, “Simon, if I am going to drive from Peking to Paris in an ugly grey car, am I going to ….”
Before I could get the word “win” out, Simon came back with a very firm, “No.”
So I replied,
“In which case, she will need to be red!”
Being both British and New Zealand in our team, we decided on the red from the Union Jack.
Eleanor is a 1941 Chevrolet Coupe S petrol 2 door saloon. She would have originally had bench seats front and back, but for rally purposes she has two Racaro rally seats and specialist 4 point seatbelt harnesses. Where the back seat was is space for the increased fuel tanks and to put all our gear.
Her engine is a 4300cc straight 6 engine. We have swapped her bumper for replacement springs, this means we can carry them without adding extra weight. She has two fuel tanks, 90 litres and 60 litres. As with a lot of these cars, we have replaced her metal boot with a vinyl one, this is to save weight No power steering, no air-conditioning, no limited slip diff. Much of how she drives is the same as she would have when she was built.
We took her on a week-long rally in Europe in the summer of 2018 so get some experience with driving her, to shake down some of the work we had done and so practice rallying and navigating.
Then off to Peking (Beijing) we went in 2019. We had a great rally and finished in Paris, tired, grateful to see family and ready for a rest. The next day we went to Place Vendôme,, where the cars had been left, and saw our Eleanor up on the car transporter, and I began to weep. She had been such a part of our lives, each day carrying us from place to place, each night I had spent tinkering with her, adjusting brakes, greasing her nipples (yes for those of you not mechanically-minded, this is a technical term) and generally ensuring she was ready for the next day on the road.
After the dust had settled, we decided we would not do another rally and to sell Eleanor so she could continue to be driven in the way she was set up for. Infact, those of you who know us well, know we were adamant we would not do another rally.
And so, we roll forward to 2021. I was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, and Andrew and I decided a bucket list was required. Amongst all the wonderful things we put on the list, we decided on a second go at the Peking to Paris and put our names down for the 2025 rally. This was particularly interesting to us because the route was likely to be completely different due to the war with Russia.
But now we would need a car. And you know Andrew, he immediately began the search and found an excellent green Pontiac which Simon from RPS thought would suit us very well. I even liked the colour! We started down the route of purchasing her, when one day Andrew was scrolling through the websites that sell this sort of car, and he suddenly found himself doing a second take,
“Hang on a minute, that’s Eleanor!”
For sale, for £5,000 less than we sold her for, and the people we bought her from had added a roll cage – this is important as you will see later. It felt so right and, if I am completely honest, I wasn’t 100% across the line about doing the rally again until the moment I knew we would have Eleanor as our car.
So, we purchased her and she went back to her Uncle Simon at RPS and he started working on her to get her back into shape and to fix a few things that we wanted to improve this time.
These included:
1. Improving the steering, in the last rally her steering had become quite floppy.
2. Changing the roof lining for vinyl, her previous lining was fabric and due to it’s porous nature, filled up with sand in the desert. For a week after we had left the desert, every time we went over a bump we were showered in dust.
3. Her engine has been rebuilt, bit of a drama here, we received the engine back with only a week to go before the cars were shipped to China.
4. A compressor installed – for pumping up tyres and cleaning air filters etc.
5. The boot was rebuilt, secure storage is very important just from thieves, but also to cope with all the bumps and rugged terrain of the desert. Everything has to be strapped down and in dust proof bags - we use sailing bags.
6. A rack for the shock absorbers. One thing you do need to carry are spare shock absorbers. We went through quite a few last time, but the team at RPS discovered they had been set up wrong, so now we have fixed that, hopefully this year we will go through less.
7. New windscreen wipers. Oh, the joys we had with the wipers last time.
8. Cargo net fixings in the back. Last time we had straps to secure everything, and this was quite fussy every day as you unpacked.
9. New tyres, last time we finished the rally in Paris on the tyres we started on, this time we have two spare tyres and one spare wheel.
And then we got the opportunity to bring our entry forward a year and so here we are, 2024 and preparing for the rally this year.
So there are many who say you should not personify your cars (or any inanimate objects), but for us each of our cars has a name and a personality which allows us to feel like they are part of our team. And if you think about it, we name boats.
In 2019 we supported the Graeme Dingle Foundation and Amigo bars. This year we are highlighting the 4 Day Week and the idea of a 4 Day World. We look forward to sharing more about that in our next post.
© Charlotte Lockhart 2024. All rights reserved.
