£1000 Challenge

Mitsubishi Galant searches out a Winter Wonderland

THE STORY SO FAR Miles driven 394 Total mileage 237,532 What’s gone wrong The clutch has gone. In the Pennines. 190 miles from the office. Terrific…

We’ve all been there – your boss comes up with a harebrained scheme and all you can do is let it play out. Such was my approach when editor David set me the task of finding snow, in one day, in early December with our mega-mile Mitsubishi Galant.

The Scottish Highlands aren’t within a day’s striking distance of CCW’s Peterborough offices, so I reckoned that I had two choices – Snowdonia or the Pennines. I decided on the Pennines because they are usefully closer, thanks to an almost direct route on the A1, and I hoped the extra latitude would help me out. Specifically, I singled out Chapel Fell, also known as Harthope Moss, as the point to aim for. It’s England’s highest publicly accessible highway at 623 metres above sea level, and this road over the top of the hills climbs some 327 metres from the nearest town – which in theory should make it three degrees Celsius colder, bringing it close to freezing if the weather forecasts were to be believed.

We set off from Peterborough early in the morning on the first proper drive I’ve had in the Galant since it went through its MoT and I could immediately feel how much tighter the rear end is now that the Panhard rod’s mounting point has been welded up; I’d previously blamed the wobbly rear-end (now gone) on bad dampers.

The 150-mile drive up the A1 to Scotch Corner may hardly have been a stern test of its handling, but the Mitsubishi eats up this kind of trip with its long gearing and comfy seats.

Into the hills

Once into the North Pennines, entering via the picturesque Barnard Castle, I could finally make the most of the Galant’s new-found handling ability. The twisty and deserted roads really warrant a sports car, but the Galant is better than you might think. Sure, the car rolls a fair bit and the steering lacks feel, but the engine is willing, the gearbox tight and handling surefooted. It was good fun, anyway, and the refreshed brakes inspired confidence.

Approaching Chapel Fell, photographer Richard Gunn and I could clearly see that there wasn’t a lick of snow on the entire mountain range. The snow poles proved that we were in the right place, but really it would have needed to be freakishly cold to provoke snow at this time of year. Nonetheless, it is still a staggeringly beautiful – and almost deserted – stretch of road, so taking the Galant through the pass once or twice was the least that we could do.

It’s remarkable how quickly the weather changes up in the hills – it’s always windy and can be sunlit one minute then a misty haze the next. A poorly resurfaced road with plenty of loose gravel meant that the front wheels were always scrabbling for grip, too.

When we’d had our fill of the pass and had captured the photographic

evidence to prove that we’d done everything we could to find some snow, we decided to head for lunch at nearby Alston – England’s highest market town.

No clutch, no lunch

The Galant’s clutch started to feel odd almost immediately as we headed down the mountains towards Alston. The biting point had dropped so drastically that only the last 25 per cent of the pedal’s movement actually had any effect. Having had a clutch release bearing go on my old Peugeot 205, I immediately identified that this was likely what was happening and it wouldn’t be long before the bearing failed completely. My one hope was that the fluid level in the clutch master cylinder was low, so I pulled over at the next opportunity, at which point the clutch made its last useful action.

The clutch fluid was right at its maximum mark, so either the master cylinder was malfunctioning or the release bearing had indeed failed. Either way, I wouldn’t be fixing it out here in the middle of the Pennines.

If I could just get onto the A1, I knew that I’d be able to get the Galant

back to the office – I really didn’t fancy hours of waiting around, in the freezing cold, for a recovery truck.

I became something of a dab hand at rev-matching gear changes when my old VW Scirocco went through a phase of snapping its clutch cables, but there’s only so much you can do without a clutch; going through long periods of stop-start traffic, for instance, would be almost impossible. So I plotted a route that had as few intersections and as little chance of congestion as possible, before