AATISH MISHRA

What questions should you ask an automotive journalist? Aatish tells you...

WHAT’S THE BEST CAR YOU’VE EVER driven?” Wrong question. Never ask an automotive journalist that. It is probably something exotic, probably Italian and mid-engined. They probably had a good time driving it as well, no doubt. But if you want to hear some really wild stuff, ask them this: what’s your craziest story from your time on the road? They would have a hard time picking one.

I’d probably go back to my time in the passenger seat of a rally car. And I use the word ‘passenger’ and not ‘co-driver’ intentionally. I was supposed to be calling out pace notes but that tulip could have been filled with Egyptian hieroglyphs for all I knew. I was as useful as ballast. Scratch that – ballast doesn’t break the car. I did.

I was less than three months into my internship with evo India when the Ed packed me and resident nutcase Dipayan off to the Dakshin Dare in a rally Esteem. I was given a 20-minute crash course in reading pace notes at a café in Bengaluru a night before the rally by Som, a professional co-driver. I understood bugger-all. My math is bad and sense of direction is worse. Ask me to do both in a car travelling full pelt and you end up with a potato in the co-driver’s seat.

I don’t remember how we reached the stage start. I was supposed to navigate the 200km or so transport stage there but like I said… hieroglyphs. I think we just found a stickered up Gypsy with a blaring exhaust heading out of town and followed it with our fingers crossed. My inability to give caution calls saw us immobile on day one itself – sump guard beached on a nasty rock, front wheels spinning freely. 20 minutes to extricate ourselves plus a driver who was blind to the track ahead meant we tumbled down the standings. Brilliant.

Day 2 was worse. I had resolved to make this co-driver thing work and was actually giving useful calls for a bit. Dipayan had just about begun to trust me when I messed up. And how. Instead of calling “trench in centre, keep right”, I called “trench on right, keep centre”. We ploughed through a 4-foot deep ditch, smashed our suspension and cracked the frame of our poor Esteem. Our service crew really overworked their welding gun over the next few days.

On day three, our gearbox gave up. We lost third and a crack in the casing drained the fluid. M Seal to the rescue. Our bonnet decided it didn’t want to stay attached any more, broke free of its clamps and smashed the windscreen. Duct tape to the rescue. I forgot to bring the torch to the one night stage of the rally. Phone (already doubling up as a GPS odometer and stopwatch) to the rescue.

When we were done with the special stages and had a straightforward transport stage to the finish line, shit hit the fan. I had taken over driving when the steering started wobbling, and moments later I saw my front left wheel come loose and make a dash for the hedge on the side of the road. We had lost our lug nuts!

You would think that this was enough of an adventure but the universe had other ideas. A cop stopped us for our loud exhaust and insisted on sitting on Dipayan’s lap in the passenger seat (roll cage at the back, remember?) as we drove to the cop station. And after we managed to extricate ourselves from there, we ran out of fuel less than a kilometre from the finish line.

See what I mean? Ferraris and Lamborghinis are great but nothing comes close to a good ol’ adventure on the road, with the universe seemingly throwing spanners, wrenches and whatever else it can find in the works. Ask the right questions to us lot and you’ll be treated to some incredible tales – surviving the harshness of the Himalayas, attempting to break records, finding incredible food in the unlikeliest of places. Sometimes these tales are dark. Accidents. Near-death experiences. But more often than not, they are unreal experiences that we have lived through, now neatly folded and tucked away in the recesses of our memories. Make sure you have a good follow-up question ready as well! ⌧

Ferraris and Lamborghinis are great but nothing comes close to a good ol’ adventure

on the road