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Ben rolls his car! 28-Oct-2003 At 1:58:26 PM Ben

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Tara and I limped back into Ararat on Monday to get the cars wheel alignment fixed and buy a new air filter. Turns out the Mitsubishi dealership is the place there to get wheel alignments done (Not the tirepower strangely enough).

Scarily enough an examination of the undercarrage by the mitsu guys, revealed a partially torn off strut/support for the front left wheel. According to the panel beater guys it looks like it'd been there for a while and was not the result of the car being rolled. My current theory is that it'd been there for a while (it was a second hand car - little 89 laser hatchback) and that perhaps the uneven roads in the gramps had made it a little worse - leading to bad wheel camber and thus the sudden loss of traction.

For those who are interested in the gory details:

There is a nasty left hand corner heading north towards Mt Stapleton just before the mobile phone tower. I'd slowed down for it and felt really comfy going around it. coming out of it I started accelerating again and the car just completely lost traction, slide left then right and ended up sideways sliding off the road. We hit a sandy ditch just off the road and left hnd side wheels of the car dropped into it and the car rolled over.

While I can certainly understand the temptation to play rally driver around the gramps I wasn't doing such at the time - given the wildlife in the gramps and my shitty car it's not really a good idea. My best guess is that it was a combination of the front wheel alignment, bad shockabsorbers (have been meaning to get them fixed for a while), driver f---up in judgement (accelerating too hard on dirt) and inexperience on that sort of surface.

In more climbingish related news the weekend gave me the chance to climb probably the easiest 15 I can think of (flake of fear - hard start move easy everything else) and one that felt really hard to me (bowler - crack).

I agree with Jevon - next time we go where there is less party temptation so we can get more climbing done. I'm thinking a trip to Araps to introduce Jevon, Maria etc to the joys of araps, perhaps with some people grabbing some bouldering mats first and getting some bouldering done too. (would love to try the araps bouldering with mats and spotters).