Miglia Quadrato 2014

A night of motor sport in the camper van...?

For the third year running (bar 2012 when it was postponed due to the Olympics taking over London), Trevor The Van took part in the Miglia Quadrato (square mile in Italian) Road Rally/Treasure Hunt. It takes place in the second weekend in May on the Saturday night, starting at midnight, finishing 5am Sunday Morning. You have 5 hours to visit upto 60 grid references within the one square mile 'City of London', jump out of your transport and find the answer to a clue. There are 20 easy to find answers, 20 medium and 20 hard.

It takes place in the traditional City of London. Starting from Finsbury Circus (green circle on the map, we travel from Chancery Lane in the West to Tower Bridge in the East, Liverpool Street Station in the North to The Thames in the South. There's a point for every correct answer, but minus one for every minute beyond 5am that you hand in your sheet - so don't be late to the finish.

On our first year we had a few motoring problems - the van was still on a terrible Indian knock-off carburetor which caused the plugs to continually soot up so we only made it through half the night and resorted to traveling on foot - not a good idea as even over a square mile, there's a lot of distance to travel between clues. We came in with around 20 points.

The second year we did better, much more attention to the exact location of the grid reference - no point looking for an answer if you're not at exactly the correct place. Each clue is accurate to 10m, so only a tiny plotting error can have you looking in completely the wrong street. We did have a minor altercation with a bollard (re-painted and 'made good' after the event', and spent most of the night unknowingly driving without headlights - not a problem really as the city is so well lit we didn't even notice. We came in with around 35 points. This was us at the start just waiting for 12pm to clock round (photo credit Matt Brown on Flickr)

This year we returned with an extra crew member (Me-navigator, Andy Barker - answer sheet man, Dave Richards - driver, Dean Pay and Big Mark - crew members). We've got a routine worked out where me and Andy plot all the points at the start while the other three set off for a few easy clues. By the time we've plotted all 60 points, we work out a route around them and set off collecting them one at a time. At a grid ref we all jump out torch in hand and set about finding the answer. Easy ones tend to be names on blue plaques or shop established dates, mediums might be a sign seen in a building through a window, and hards.... well we've only ever found three of them and most of those were by spotting someone else looking at something and realising they must be onto a clue...).

All sorts of vehicles take part from a 1902 (?) vintage car which runs with a sound like the spark timing and piston position are completely random - complete with oil lamp headlights, to this 1910 (I think) fire engine. Useful as the crew can all cling on to the side rail like the firemen would have. (photo credit Matt Brown on Flickr)

There's also regularly a vintage delivery truck (1920's) and other then that mostly modern stuff, but our result this year of 12th out of 62 entrants shows the CF is a pretty useful vehicle for the job. A table in the back for plotting on and space for 6 people (the maximum you're allowed in the Miglia) makes up for the slightly cumbersome size, but the excellent turning circle does come in useful when we (regularly) need to change plans (go the wrong way) due to the many tiny old streets in the City. We scored 26 points, unfortunately one point away from a First Class Award, but it was much harder this year then last due to masses of road works and some of the easy clues being much tougher than usual, so pretty happy that we're getting better every year.

The van ran well (i'll explain about the alternator nearly falling off in a later post) with no mishaps - roll on next year. If you want to enter, send an e mail now to the organising club to get yourself on the mailing list  uhulmc@k3g.net . It's only ~35 quid to enter, well worth it. Any car at all can enter, but it would be good to get a fleet of CF's in - they are desperate for more people to compete to make the time spent organising worth while.


The organising club's web site is:

http://users.breathe.com/pwa/uhulmc/miglia.htm#I

you can easily see some photos of what the event's like by searching, and this video shows another crew's complete night in 2.5 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_uC226Nsg