Finke 2012 was the the quietest one yet. No Backyard Boys, no family, no crew at all. We didn't even have anyone to drive the truck but my good mate Dan (with the Ranger a few pages back) had his truck going down to meet him at Finke, so we through our spares, tools and fuel in too.
Prologue was a pretty steady time of 6:06 which was 3rd in class and 50th outright from 84 starters.
Race day one saw us lose a lot of time stopping to deal with a myriad of problems. First a relay stopped the low pressure pump from working but we fixed that. Then we had our first ever tyre change when one of the MTRs went flat. And to top it all off we ran out of fuel and had to "borrow" a jerry can from a generous race fan on the side of the track. Don't even know who he is but we were very grateful. We finished day one 3rd in class and 40th outright in a time of 3hrs26min.
We had also torn a front inner CV boot so we changed that and re-gased the shocks and got ready for day 2.
We actually had a great run out of Finke and were making time on the competition when the gearbox let go about 40kms in. It looked like the front diff had tried to jump out of the case and was leaking oil badly. We decided to continue on slowly and just try to finish if the gearbox held up. The gear shifting was still okay and we still had all five but it was making a deafening grinding noise.
Strangely enough, the noise began to ease so we went a little faster, then faster again, and soon we were back to race pace albeit with only rear drive. Don't know how the gearbox held up with no oil and all that grinding, but it did, and that 20kg Viscous Centre did a superb job of directing enough drive to the back diff. We still did it in 3hrs30min and that was enough for 3rd in class and 35th outright.
You can see the small hole in the side of the case. It doesn't look much but that 'box is toast.
Well done mate that's an amazing accomplishment, hope you convinced a few people of what a Subi is capable of 
