After the first outing the Fat One was mainly used for transporting chores in and around Hamburg. For example did Franz cut a tree in front of their house in order to get more light into the flat and the debris from the tree was easily hauled using the enormous capacity of the wagon.
There were still some very cold, wintery days and we discovered some issues with the battery, which now got replaced with a much more powerful one. As there will be quite a few power consuming devices attached to the car doing our trip like mobile phones, dash cam, electrical cooler for drinks, walkie-talkies etc., we thought this was a wise decision for we don’t want to be stranded in the middle of a Nordic nowhere because of a flat battery. It’s been working fine since and even after prolonged periods of non-usage of the car.
In March Jörg then did the first longer trip with the Fat One since picking it up. He was driving from Hamburg to Dortmund, then through the Sauerland to visit his family, and at the end of the weekend back to Hamburg. The positives were that the car is a fast cruiser where all the original horses still appear to be on board. As you can see from this screenshot the Fat One is even going much faster than the specs claim (V-max 230km/h).
I don’t know its specs around fuel consumption but assume that when pushing it, as I did, it drinks a bit more. So far we’ve not got it far below 10L/100km and during this trip it was just south of 12L/100km. On the way back to Hamburg I was trying to not push it that much i.e. not going faster than 180km/h but because of a very cold and stormy north-easterly headwind consumption was not lower. This is of course valuable info that we need when we have to calculate and budget the overall consumption during the rally.
The other thing that I realized during the trip was that the heater controls are behaving a bit randomly. It is equipped with an automatic climate control system but on the outbound leg it was difficult to keep the passenger side from getting too warm, on the way back I couldn’t get it really warm at all. We’ll have to test this a bit more and if push comes to shove have to bring it back to the Garagist to get it checked and eventually mended.
Then we did another trip just last weekend where we drove the car to Schmallenberg to Falke, Franz’s employer, who as a sponsorship offered get the car wrapped with the famous Burlington check.
But this will be something for another post.
Scuderia Nordica 