I went with a friend and fellow club member, Briggs Patterson, to St. Louis to drive the 2019 Endurance Rally on Saturday April 6th. This was about the fifth time I have done this rally and this year we took my 1970 B GT.

I spent a couple of hours on the Wednesday beforehand checking the car over, making sure we had all the possible spares & tools we might need, as you never know what might happen.

Fluid levels were good, belts & hoses in good shape and so forth. Like the good Boy Scout, it pays to be prepared! The trip down on the Friday was fine apart from a ticking that appeared with the engine under load as we got into St. Louis. This turned out to be the cooling fan blades on the alternator catching the body and we found a slight amount of play in the bearing. No problem as we had a spare alternator (actually two) but for now we just loosened the belt a touch to reduce the load on the bearings and bent the fan blades so they no longer caught. Noise gone and it stayed gone for the rest of the trip.

There were twelve starters, all MGs apart from one Jaguar.

The first order of business on the Saturday was a mileage check. We followed one of the Rally masters on a prescribed route of about ten miles with all our trip odometers zeroed. The resulting mileages at the end of the check were then recorded so they could be factored to give everyone a level playing field.

We were given a series of eleven checkpoints to visit and record some missing information at each one. We were also told the rally would be between 200 and 500 miles and we had twelve hours to complete it. The objective is to get to each checkpoint and back to the start in the minimum possible mileage. We then spent an hour deciding the sequence in which to visit the checkpoints and plotting the route to the first one using only maps and gazetteers. GPS, smart phones etc. are banned. Then we set off into deepest Missouri. Just under twelve hours later we returned having driven some 330 miles. We crossed one ford, drove for miles on dirt roads and had one road that was marked on the map stop in the middle of nowhere forcing us to retrace our steps. Two dogs with death wishes attacked the car whist we were doing about 30 mph! We managed to avoid a turtle crossing the road and saw a muskrat-type of animal diving into a culvert. Along the way we met some nice folks at checkpoints who were wondering what all the little British cars were doing and found that stopping and asking where checkpoints where was very useful in curtailing mileage particularly in the bigger towns. It also gave us a chance to stretch our legs a bit. Ten cars completed the event. One lost the odometer cable, so game over and the other had a flat tire and found out the hard way their spare wouldn’t hold air, oops! Our route managed to get us second place, only half a mile more than the winners. It was a lot of fun and a true test of endurance for the cars, the drivers and navigators. To finish off the weekend we both ran the Go St. Louis half marathon on the Sunday morning before pointing the MGB back up I55 towards Chicago. Once home I swapped out the alternator and treated the car to a wash & polish. We hope to be back next year.

~~Steve Skegg