22 ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM...

If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that the Bust Rally is predominantly for old cars.  The website says the vehicles should cost just £500 ideally (but they confirm that any car is welcome).  Our Abarth will not cost £500; realistically, they are more likely to cost £5000, which puts us in a moral quandary.  What is the point of doing a banger rally in a car that is actually good?

We have broken out the ingenuity again and may have a way around this rule. We will buy the cars, rally them to the Med and back, and then sell them once we are back in Blighty.  If we choose wisely and don’t spend too much preparing them, we should get all our money back.  Thus, we will have completed the event in a car that cost us ZERO.  Pretty clever, huh?!

The chances of getting exactly what we paid are slim, but if we lose less than £500 on the car, we will still come in under the target cost.

Carl is calculating the costs of buying the car on his credit card a month before the race, doing what needs to be done on it, completing the rally, and selling it within 60 days.  He reckons the interest on the cost of the car will be relatively small, so his loss will be nominal.  If he buys well, he can make a profit!

Of course, this cash recuperating won’t include additional alloys or any other parts needed to get the care across Europe and back, but we may be able to sell them, too, if we buy low and fix them up for a few quid.

I’m in a slightly different situation as I need a car and will probably keep the little Abarth after our epic journey, so I must choose VERY wisely.  I can’t gamble on it limping along for 2500 miles, and then we flog it to a sucker, laughing all the way to the bank.  I need to use it for work on the Monday we return home.   I therefore, a moral dilemma; maybe I can offset this by raising a few bob for charity?