We've just arrived back from London and the National Pre-Rally meet weekend, and have achieved undoubtedly our best fuel efficiency stats to date. For the journey of around 120 miles we used probably less than a quarter of a litre of fuel. How? Well, because 99 per cent of the journey was done on the back of an AA van.

Yes, we have once again experienced a spectacular failure on a test-run, taking our tally to a thoroughly un-reassuring 2 failures in our first three trips.

So, what's going on then? In short, our car is showing its age. Its pretty much falling apart, and its our job now to break as many things as possible in the hope that we can fix them for good prior to departing for Mongolia in July. On a positive note, the thing that went wrong today was a new failure, and almost certainly unrelated to any blind tamperings we've done to date. And in the spirit of eternal optimism, it provides us with an 'opportunity' to upgrade the car yet further.

The first warning signs of our impending failure revealed themselves just after fueling up in North London. After initially thinking that Ben was applying an 'advanced' driving technique by kangarooing the car violently - he told me that all was not well - and that the lurching was nothing to do with his tunure at the wheel. I made some feeble effort to ignore the problem by mumbling something about dodgy fuel and that it would clear up. Seconds later, and in the spectacular surrounds of 10 lanes of traffic (yes 10 - 6 lanes of North Circular merging with 4 of A1) the Panda decided that its work for the day was done.

Amid a hail of horns and swerving cars we leapt out for some now well rehersed under-bonnet diagnosis/chin scratching. After a few unsuccessful minutes we then did what can only be descibed as some extreme urban manoeuvering, with Ben pushing the car across the aforementioned lanes of traffic, whilst I steered and counter-gesticulated.


After a bit more chin scratching, the AA man turned up and spent a good while with us trying to revive the patient.

He was, to use a cliche, a very nice man. He explained what he was up to and showed us a systematic methodolgy for fault finding, finally concluding that our 'ignition amplifier' was broken. As we had already discovered, this had the effect of making our car not work.

We then had to await the arrival of a second van, to relay us back to Birmingham, and spent the time watching 'Long Way Round' (The Ewan McGregor documentary where he covers most of our route to Mongolia) on Ben's laptop. Whilst marvelling at his hopeless predicament at the far end of the earth, we were living out our own, on the North Circular.

Five and half hours after setting out from London we finally get home.