Murcie's time on the Mystery Box Rally - for a good cause of course.

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Murcie LP710
So I came back from Melbourne yesterday having completed the first annual Mystery Box Rally and I figured I'd share it with you all. I'll try and keep it somewhat brief.

Bit of a back story first: for a few years now an organisation based in Adelaide of Australia has been running an annual rally called the :censored:box Rally (starts with s, ends in t and it isn't soot, unfortunate name for the censorship on this forum but I shall press on). Essentially what that rally is, is a 3000km point-to-point trip across all forms of terrain in the Australian outback, in cars that cost each team of 2 less than AU$1000 that must be roadworthy and/or registered.

The Mystery Box was started this year by the same mob and it's a smaller but no less ridiculous rally where the teams of two fly/drive in to Melbourne, buy a car based only on first sight of it on an auction stand, then drive a 2500km round trip on a route that we only get given each day, again on both sealed and unsealed/rough roads, before ending up back in Melbourne. All money raised on both of these rallies is for the Cancer Council in NSW. Mystery Box on its own raised around $212,000 and that number is still rising while the fundraising is open for a couple more weeks.


limeandcustard by Murcie_LP640, on Flickr

Our team was the Lime & Custard Tarts, named appropriately by yours truly after the colour of the cars we both own. We'd never done the :censored:box Rally before in fact this was our first time doing anything of the sort so we were kind of excited but mostly nervous.



Arriving at Melbourne from our home town (we decided to drive in with SIC EM) and getting to Manheim Auctions where we would get our cars we pretty much got straight into it after filling out all the paperwork BS. Essentially the way this worked was we had a budget of whatever amount of donations and sponsorship each team had raised for the rally. We had $3019 to spend, a few other teams had $3000, while some had $10k+ (there were 43 pairs).

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The car we eventually bought didn't come out for a fair while but there were some interesting specimens up on the stand, like this Ford Capri:

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A Peugeot 306:

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An old Ford Festiva that looked pretty dodgy (as were the couple of lads driving it ;) ):

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A Toyota Hiace (which had a rather dodgy but entertaining alarm):

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And a Mazda MX-6:

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The car we ended up with was this rather plain Jane Suzuki Baleno:

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Didn't look too bad on first sight. Everything checked out in the engine bay, did have a few scratches and dents but nothing too bad. 148,xxxkms on the clock (not bad for a 2000 model) and it was a 4-speed auto. Reason we went for it is because plain Jane and boring was likely to be better in the long run in terms of reliability (SPOILER ALERT: It wasn't. :D ).

Leaving Manheim Auctions the following morning was interesting. Everyone had some time after the auction and that following morning to chuck stickers on the cars and decorate them a little bit but nothing too elaborate. We didn't have any stickers for the Zook so it was looking boring as usual but we were still confident.

We all got put into our own "Buddy Groups" which we'd need to stick with the whole way. If someone's having trouble, everyone in the group had to pull over and if we had other teams pass us we either had to give the Team America Secret Signal to let them know we were in trouble or two big thumbs up to let them know we were A-OK.

Right from the start the Buddy Group system fell apart because everyone nicked off out of order but we eventually got it all together the following days. We were in Buddy Group 6, the last ones to leave (and, usually, the last ones to get there :D), with the Flein Scotsman in the Festiva, the C Team in a Gen1 Nissan Pathfinder, WAOF in a Holden/Vauxhall Vectra, Risky Business in a Hyundai Accent and Team Chips in an AUII Ford Falcon.

Day 1 was running from Melbourne to a town called Hay in New South Wales. Leaving Melbourne was the easy part. It was when we got onto the Hume Freeway when things started to go awry for the L&C Tarts, which was almost immediately. Not even an hour out of Melbourne we had to pull over for some TLC on the cooling system on the Baleno, which then happened twice more before it got put on a trailer with one of the support teams to get towed the rest of the way to Hay. So, not even 150kms out from the start of the Rally and we were already having to hitchhike with another team. We ended up in WAOF's Vectra.

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About 100km out of Echuca (halfway point through the first leg) we caught up with the rest of Team 6 who had stopped to get some beers and lunch and met the rest of the crew. We bonded pretty quickly with each other.

Nothing else out of the ordinary happened on the way to Hay, we pulled up in the caravan park for the night's stopover, had a nice roast dinner and a few drinks at the services club, then we all went onto the greens for a bit of barefoot drunken lawn bowls:

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Also during the course of the Rally we had a little "game" to play where every time a person said the word "mine" (in any context), they had to do 10 push ups (even if they were driving, pull the convoy over, push ups) which very quickly tallied up:

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The next day was our first encounter with unsealed roads, heading from Hay to White Cliffs, further up in NSW.

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(and yes to use the old joke that Camry there is a 2.2 :P)

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The support crew had done a bit of a bodge on the Baleno the night before and we were hoping for good things. It wasn't to be. We didn't even make it a half an hour before it went back on the trailer.

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So we went back in WAOF's Vectra until we pulled into a small town in the middle of butt 🤬 nowhere when the blokes from the Flein Scotsman gave us a chance to drive the old Festiva, which was surprisingly a lot of fun. Best of both worlds: we got back into the Rally, and the FS guys jumped in the back of Team Chips' Falcon where the beer was. Job done.

Stopover 2 at White Cliffs was the fancy dress party:

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And as is per usual in Australia everyone got plastered.

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Before the party the support crew working on the Baleno had grown exponentially (how many Hawaiians does it take to fix a Mystery Box?) and the MX-6 also had to be trailered in with an ignition problem.

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The MX-6 eventually got back on the road but the poor Zook was declared terminal due to head gasket failure. Was fixable, but not where we were. Unfortunately it had to get dumped.

Team 6 had a team meeting and we decided to let each other switch the cars around between us all the following days so we all still had a chance to get in on the action. Night 2 was also where the shenanigans started. Someone nicked the key for the Festiva, the blokes driving the Hiace got guns filled with silly string out and race tape was used to add some interesting accessories to the cars. Risky Business turned into Frisky Business, sometimes also known as Team 69, Tassie Terrors turned into the Ass Terrors, and there were several silly string funny faces on the windows of the cars.

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Day 3, and Team 6 were delayed once again because a couple of the boys had to hotwire the Festiva since the key had vanished into thin air.

But eventually we were back on it, heading for our new destination of Tibooburra, the most northern-west town in NSW and pretty much the definition of butt 🤬 nowhere. This was the roughest road we had to deal with the whole trip and it was unsealed the whole way.

We had cattle crossings, roos, lots of hot weather in cars that most of which didn't have working windows or air conditioning, and a shedload of dust. We mixed up the pairs in Team 6 for this one, I went with one of the guys from Team Chips in the Festiva while my "ex-co-driver" Keira took the Falcon.

This leg was a lot of fun. Short in kays but it was still a long day as we were hampered by road conditions.

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Tibooburra was a great little town. Great meals, nice weather, great camping spot and very welcoming. And, again, everyone was on the piss, which is pretty much the other custom of this rally.

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Again we had more shenanigans with the race tape; and about 8 guys pushed the Festiva from the pub to the camping ground (without realising it was both unlocked and hotwired so they could have started it with pretty much anything) with one of the support crew on top, Priscilla-style, before grabbing the tent out of the back and wrapping it around the car and changing the name from "Flein Scotsman" to "Not Men". One of the teams had printed off 120 extra of their name stickers so they then went to town on all the cars with those.

Day 4 was much smoother, literally, than the previous day. We had patches of unsealed roads before going to full bitumen, heading back south towards Melbourne again. Our stopover this time was Wentworth in NSW, right on the Murray-Darling river crossing. Didn't have any trouble-making this time but it was still great fun.

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Day 5 was the final trek from Wentworth back to Melbourne. All sealed roads, and a pretty cruisy end to a great rally. Team 6, rather surprisingly considering how far behind we'd been through the other legs, actually arrived back at Manheim first. We then had a few hours to get all the stickers off the cars, freshen up and then head to the Imperial Hotel in the CBD for the awards presentation and post-rally party. I had to say it did feel nice getting back in the WRX again, I'd missed her dearly the past 5 days but there was always the lingering thought that I wished I was still on the rally!

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The L&C Tarts got nominated for a few awards (mostly the ones to do with breakdowns :D) and Team 6 was nominated for Spirit of the Rally, essentially the top award for the group that gets into the groove of the rally the best and had the most fun. Keira, myself and Team "There's Something About..." got medals for our cars dying (There's Something About...'s Lancer died on the very last leg).

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And so, that's it, job done! After several hard months of fundraising we finally got our reward to drive our clapped out Boxes across many kilometres of desert and remarkable scenery. Would I do it again? Well I'm doing it again next year so there's your answer :) Enjoy.

EDIT: All rights to Luisa Mirabilio for the photos taken, and there's a lot more of them on Facebook.
 
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Thanks for the comprehensive write-up Murcie, the pics you have taken/ gathered are superb at conveying the spirit of the rally. 👍

I have heard of the 🤬 box before; some colleagues a few years ago did it (although never bothered to tell us how it went) and the whole concept is just awesome. I've love to do it one day, but I am not sure what reality that would ever happen in.

As roadtrip's go, this one looks like one to do before the proverbial bucket is kicked - thanks for sharing :cheers:.

PS: A Suzuki :crazy: Srsly :P.
 
No worries at all mate. It was definitely an excellent experience and I can't wait to get into it all again next time. I did take a few photos myself and some GoPro footage (mostly of that first hour where I managed to record the exact moment the Suzuki died :D) but these photos were taken by Luisa Mirabilio (great photography especially all the motion shots) and are from the Mystery Box Facebook page to keep file size down.

PS: A Suzuki :crazy: Srsly :P.

Heyyyy, Zooks are great! Well...most of them anyway :D
 
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Holy snot that looks like a ton of fun and dirt. Very awesome pictures too. I'd love to participate in an event like this, but sadly I live in the wrong part of the world, heh.
 
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