V8 goes East - 16
This report from Gordon Hesketh-Jones covers the trip from Prague, the weekend stay at Erlangen with fellow V8 enthusiasts, Allan & Eva Doyle, and then on to France for home.(1.6.05)

Exiting Prague was quite easy as we were already on the West side so quite quickly picked up the E50 motorway past Plzen and this was to take us to the border where we were waved through but once again saw long lines of lorries queuing. The Grand European Plan is that this E50 would link up with the A93/E60 which runs roughly North/South in Germany but unfortunately action by environmentalists had badly delayed the start of construction, so we had 12 miles of slow crawl in the heat before joining the Autobahns for Nurnberg which we skirted safely and correctly picked up the B4 for Erlangen where we were due to stay with fellow V8 enthusiasts Allan and Eva Doyle for the weekend - but this is where the problems started.

I had printed out a 2.5" to the mile map of the route to their house from my MS AutoRoute 2005 software route planning software, but this showed a crossroads where there was in fact a bridge so we cheerfully carried on up the B4 to a crossroads where we turned left as planned but found ourselves totally lost. Allan with great skill navigated us to his house using the mobile phone to Jennifer, at one point asking that I rev the engine so he could hear me! After a shower and phone call from Victor Smith in the UK to check we had arrived safely and then some lunch, it was time for some serious business - drinks in the shade for Jennifer and Eva. Shortly after our arrival Eva had once again very kindly performed her "Lady of the Laundry" act for which we were most grateful.

Meanwhile Allan and I looked for the cause of a nasty noise from the rear neraside shock absorber, finding that it was nothing more than a nyloc nut which had worked 1½ turns loose. Now the bolt holding the shock absorber is I think 7/16" in diameter and a new nyloc nut had been used and torqued up correctly when fitting the shock absorber. This gives some idea of the incredible pounding which the rear suspension had taken during our trip so I am glad that I used a proper stainless steel nyloc nut (which just stayed there) rather than a normal nut which would have undone itself completely and disappeared………..

As you know there is no form of additional lateral location of the V8 rear axle other than the stronger springs fitted to the model, and we could see some mechanical abrasion on the outer side of the gaiters of the two prototype shock absorbers I have been testing, which gives some indication of the way in which the back axle was continually moving from side to side during its exploration of the craters on the Romanian roads. I looked at the bump stops which had taken a battering several hundred times in Romania but both the stops and the check straps seemed to be OK. Allan said that his car had never hit the bump stops! My car was visibly down at the rear and the new springs fitted in April 2002 which have covered only 38,000 miles will have to be replaced; this too is more due to the roads in Romania than to the fact that Jennifer cannot spell the work "Light" as used in the phrase "Travelling Light".

The following day Kai Knickman arrived together with his wife Claudia and their two sons and we had a session of comparing cars. I felt that their standard engines had much more low-down torque than mine but Allan in particular felt that my RV8 manifolds released a lot more power and my engine was very keen to rev, whilst Kai felt that his car was identical in feel to Allan's but was surprised at how well the coil-over-Bilstein front suspension on my car worked, the front end and steering being very well controlled. Kai took several photos of