10 June — the report from Day 24.

The workshop in Azerbaijan had worked until late in the night.

This morning we went early to the start.
But starting after a repair with no chance to test it is, honestly, nothing but nerves.
The rough look of the sealant did not help.
Still, having come this far, I am full of the wish to claw back the four days of competition we lost in China, and get to the finish in Paris.

Today’s start is in the centre of Baku.

As the sun came up we started the engine to see what last night’s work had achieved — and the same odd noise was still there, which set my nerves going.

Beside us, our friends in the pre-war class had a large map open and were holding a route conference.
Their theme: get the car to the finish without straining it. Two weeks to go, and with every car in trouble, the question is how to finish at all.

Car 6, the 1928 Ford that had trouble from the start just as we did, had been building its strategy around safety first from very early on, disregarding the results and thinking only of reaching Paris in one piece.

Their care — looking for the shortest, safest tarmac and going carefully — is worth learning from. And yet we cannot quite hold down the urge to adventure, and want to take on the convoy’s route wherever we can.

Every morning car 6 asks us what we are doing about the route, and warns us that if we push it we will never see the finish — and every day we go on regardless.

Today, this being partly a test run, we asked them to go together — and partway along, of course, we went off onto the adventurous dirt.

We would not do anything reckless, but while they kept to their own pace, we could not help getting ahead.

Still, mindful of the car as we were, the sheer scale of the Azerbaijani landscape was not to be missed.

Enormous country opened out in front of us, and it washed me clean.

The driver and I hardly speak in the car, and we drive nearly twelve hours a day in silence — and even so, I feel that hours this concentrated, this absorbed in a goal, do not come round often in a life.

The route book said there was a lunch stop today, which I had been looking forward to, and we got there first.

Or so we thought — in fact no food had been laid on, and we were told to order in a restaurant ourselves. That was more time than we could spare, so we pressed on before the other cars arrived.
We had come all that way, so at least one photograph.
And then we heard some startling news.

The 1914 LaFrance, car number 1, the symbol of the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, had caught fire. (Photograph borrowed from another entrant’s post.)

Everyone admired the way that crew fought. They naturally started first every morning — always one or two hours before the official time, setting off before dawn.

Even starting before daylight, they had to stop for maintenance along the way and always came in last, late at night. Punishing days.

Hearing that those brave souls had been engulfed in flames sent a shock round all of us.
They start at dawn and we still pass them, because they are always stopped somewhere doing maintenance.
Remembering all the days up to now —

back at camp, with everyone else asleep, they would be working by torchlight; I never once saw them talking or eating with the rest of us.
With that picture of them in my mind, and their fight in my heart on the day they were out, we drove on to tonight’s stop.

We reached it safely and early in the evening, and the car that has given nothing but trouble ran astonishingly well today.We were about to open a beer —

and a message came from the organisers.

“Your car is leaking petrol. Please check it at once.”

So much for breathing out; back to the car and into maintenance.

Then an electrical fault out of nowhere meant the engine would not start. We tracked the cause down at last and got it running again.

The beer we finally raised had gone completely warm, but the relief of having got through another day made me drink it straight down.

How many days now have we spent fighting this car?
Every day something happens, and one step forward, one more step forward,
is how we have got here.

Tomorrow, at last, the Georgian border.

Continued in Day 25 …