Two idiots. Two continents. One thousand two hundred ccs. Ten thousand miles.
ONE BLOODY GREAT CHALLENGE.
Who We Are
Adventurists? Or just two bored lads with no real sense of shame? You decide. Whichever way you look at it, though, Team Young Offenders have gone to great lengths to raise money for charity. We’ve journeyed from Minchinhampton to Maranello and from South Cerney to the South of France, wearing fancy dress and driving terrible cars, and have raised over £1000 for charity in the process.
Now we’re raising the bar. If you took the Olympic Record for the high jump, and then you put it on top of the Empire State Building, you’d have some idea of just how big a raise we’re talking about. It’s truly whopping.
What We're Doing
On 18 July 2009, 350 cars will depart from glorious Goodwood, the home of British speed. A month later, some of those 350 cars will roll into Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia, after a journey of more than 8,000 miles. Team Young Offenders will be among them. Well, we'll be departing from Goodwood, anyway: odds on our actually getting to Mongolia are rather unattractive.
We told you the bar was high, and it’s about to get higher. According to the Organisers (the rather wonderful League of Adventurists), each vehicle must have an engine size of no more than 1200cc (although exceptions are made for those vehicles with ‘significant comedy value’). So a car designed for taking your desserts home from Kwik-Save will, instead, be subjected to the deserts of Kazakhstan. To add the final flourish, Team Young Offenders have fulfilled both the 1200cc (well, nearly) and the ‘significant comedy value’ stipulations: we're taking the world's first four-wheel-drive three wheeler, composed thusly:
25% 1986 Reliant Rialto (Cecile)
30% 2000 Suzuki Jimny JLX (Jenny)
44% filler (B&Q).
1% Hugh's knuckle skin (unwashed).
We're in the process of building this at the moment - when it's built, we're going to bestow upon it the best theme Mongolia will ever have seen. It's all a bit hush-hush at the moment - keep checking the Blog for updates...
Who we're doing it for:
We decided to raise money for Christina Noble Childrens Foundation because they do such good work for the orphans of Mongolia. In a traditionally nomadic country, city life in Ulaan Bataar is pretty tough going, and parents can frequently find themselves unable to support their children, so many kids as young as 3 are abandoned and forced to seek shelter in the sewers - the only warm place during winter, where temperatures can dip below -25 degrees. CNCF have founded the Sunshine Ger Village, which provides shelter, care, food and education to some of the most deprived children. Me and Hugh are both big kids at heart, so we're proud to be able to help out other kids who, through no fault of their own, haven't had the opportunities we have.
