Super-Grass

A nice pic of the "chuck wagons" around the camp site at night, but then this one. I was trying so hard to keep this quiet but it's just too priceless to let go by, possibly even beating the "Dad falls in canal" story. Yup, we were heading home from the camp and Dad beginning to celebrate the fact that we looked , for the first time ever, to be likely to complete the journey to/from a distant camp without breakdown or incident.

But we were only about 15 miles from home and getting down to the vapour on the petrol tank, so we were forced to stop in the old Farthing Corner (now Medway) services on the M2, where (so goes the excuse put about by Dad) the pumps were unfamiliar BP ones (we always use Shell, because Dad has a loyalty card). Also, allegedly he was tired and winding down nearly home.

Only faintly registering the £1.159 price per litre we fire up and carry on when, 2 miles down the road the car starts to misfire and make all sorts of choking noises. We pull off the motorway, that sinking feeling hitting us. Parked by the side of the M2 Dad realises the horrible truth - he's just put £22's worth of premium diesel in the car. Now a 2CV can run on all sorts of rough old low grade fuels, but diesel isn't one of them.

There is nothing for it but to call the AA for a lift for the last 15 miles or so to home, push the car up onto the drive and call 2CV-Doctor Lew. When he's finished laughing he relieves us all by saying that no permanent damage has been done, but we need to drain off the diesel, drop the tank to flush it out with petrol, take the top off the carb to dry out the float chambers and blow through the whole lot with his compressor. All of that we do last night, and Clara is back in the pink of good health.

It's the other way round you do the damage - petrol in a diesel car, we're told - not only can it strip all the lubrication off the high-pressure pumps and sieze them, it can also detonate when the 27:1 compression ratio goes to work on it. We just had a bad case of indigestion. Dad is philosophical and taking all the gales of laughter in good part, but I suspect he'll be a bit more careful choosing his fuel pump nozzles in the future....

Poor ol' Dad!

Deefski