RALLYING IN A GLA45 AMG
Taking the GLA45 to a stage of the Rally of Maharashta
THE ONLY TIME I’VE BEEN RALLYING WAS OVER half a decade ago. I got a crash course in reading tulips on the first day of the Raid-de-Himalaya, lost over two hours trying to get us to the end of the stage and that was that. My career as a navigator never took off once we crawled past the finish line. I’m happy because I hate reading a book in a car when I’d rather grab it by the scruff of its neck. But I should have brushed up on my navigation skills anyway because we were going to drive the GLA 45 AMG on one of the stages for this month’s Rally of Maharashtra. And I am the driver-cum-navigator. Oh, well!
So we set off from Pune, get to Nashik by late evening and catch up with Ashwin Pandit, the man behind the Nashik round of the Indian rally championship. He is about to hand me the tulip chart to get to 'Windmill stage' when he sees my puzzled eyes, and instead draws the route on a blank piece of paper to this picturesque location. We leave early the next day from our hotel off the MumbaiNashik highway, flat out over crests, cautious through a few hairpins, sharp left up the hill, flying past a small lake on the left to our starting point. Alright, I’ve overdone the rally talk.
But we were excited to drive this rally stage. Me, because it’s a desolate stretch of road that starts alongside a series of windmills and ends somewhere in the next hill, snaking through the Western Ghats with the lush forests on one side and a plateau on the other. And the GLA 45 AMG because it is built for tight tarmac roads like these. With the drive set in Sport, the exhaust valve's flap open to do a joyous drum roll, we drive up the hill climb and right into the clouds. The windmills are sighted high up on open ground to my left so that there is no obstruction to the flow of air. The air, sped up by a kind of Venturi effect by the surrounding mountains, spins the long and slender blades that in turn spins a turbine, to create kilowatts out of… nothing. Well not nothing; air. Windmills are like turbochargers in that sense, using air, blowing at high velocities and pressures, and turning it into (horse/electric) power.