We had an "R.S. Days Light" meeting with just nine attendees over the weekend at our usual location in the center of Germany. It was different to the usual meeting with all the orga behind and bling around it but that gave us way more time for driving and just hanging out. We did an awesome 260km tour around the area with some stops for food, drinks and so on. A ferry ride over the river Weser was also included. The region is really beautiful with picturesque old villages with hundreds of years old timber framed houses. Many villages have their own restaurant with awesome food in top quality. Most with meet from the local butcher or fresh caught fish out of the next river or lake. The area is perfect for Clio driving with lots of small, windy backrounds sometimes leading up to around 750m with grades up to 15%. For a city dweller with only flat overcrowded, overregulated and overwatched roads around this is like heaven. Our local guide knows the roads in and out which allows for some proper driving that in my opinion tops anything you can do including laps on the Nordschleife.
Here is a shot with the cars we took on the big tour at the ritually visited viewpoint Schwabenthal on the Hoher Meißner mountain (612m ASL).
Unfortunately the RS gods weren't really on our side as one R27 had its timing belt broken on the journey to the meeting. The owner got a Hyundai i30 estate as replacement from the ADAC in time and since he also thought it would be a wise decision to collect a wrecked F4R from a hill-climb Clio on the arrival instead of departure he presumably couldn't have driven the tour anyway.
So that really wasn't a problem but this unfortunately wasn't everything that happend. One driveshaft of the the second Twingo that should have taken part said nope just when the owner left home. He managed to lend an M2RS from a buddy so he could still attend but the car was in such horrible shape that we disallowed him to take part on the tour with it.
The possibly most dangerous thing was happening to my buddy with the Meglio on our journey to the meeting. He was just treating a recalcitrant 3er BMW estate when he suddenly couldn't steer correctly at over 200km/h. He managed to pull over and everything felt fine again so he decided to continue to drive at lower speeds. For some time everything seemed to fine but when we left the Autobahn and started to drive on the backroads it started to happen again with also activating the ABS and reducing power. We pulled over and contacted our local RS buddy who luckily managed to contact a mechanic who's working at a Renault dealership in the next bigger town. While my buddy crept to the dealer I checked in the hotel for us. When I arrived at the dealer the car was already on the lift. Turns out the nut from the track rod end had somehow wiggled lose and was holding it with just some windings. After closer inspection and tries to put it together it seemed like the bracket which is holding the ABS cable/sensor kept the nut from properly tightning so it was decided to put the nut on directly and then the bracket with an other nut on top of that. This cured the problem for this and the next day. But changing the position of bracket unfortunately seems to have lead to the ABS cable or sensor somehow getting damaged over time so the car started to throw ABS faults with power reductions on sunday again. My buddy was luckily able to turn ABS and everything else except powersteering off so we could at least drive home at reduced speed with no further issue.
As you can see from the photo we took six RS on the big tour. Which ment some cars had some BoP which resulted in an actually noticable reducting in the performance of the Twingo. An other hindering factor which was slightly reducing the possibly achivable was that the owners of two Clios though it would be a wise decision to buy some Bridgestone Potenzas for their cars. I took a passenger ride in one of the Clio and holy moly that rubber is outright criminal. Consequently cars with Bridgestone tires are now banned from taking part at our tours until further notice.
I'll maybe post some more pics in the closer future.
www.toyotires.com
