Well, on Friday 27 July we set off from Zurich to Boulogne and via Speed Ferries to Dover thence Hastings. On to Norwich, lots of driving around, back down to Hastings then Dover, back to Boulogne and thus onwards to Zurich. Total distance after driving back into the garage at home was 3,045 KM. All of it driven without a single hiccup or glitch from the 8. I was very pleased with the performance of the car in terms of trouble free long distance driving (longest bit was Zurich to Boulogne at 850KM) and in driving fun - great to drive long distance at pretty high speeds. The Autoroutes in northern France are lovely smooth two lane black top, long sweeping bends and long down / up hill stretches and there's very little traffic on these roads. This meant I could go a bit faster than allowed (;-)) and got up over 220 KPH for a few stretches. Very few speed cameras on these roads and they're easy to spot too.
Speaking of spotting, during the trip we saw 5 other 8's - black 840 CI parked on the seafront in Hastings, Green 8 near Aylsham on the bypass in Norfolk, Yellow CSi (?) near Frant in E. Sussex, Blue 8 on the M11 and a silver 8 parked on the seafront at Great Yarmouth.
The driving 8's all waved and flashed - good company with an 8 on the road.
The car returned 600km per tankfull which didn't seem to vary much regardless of how driven, used Shell V-Power where possible, I definitely notice a difference using V-Power compared with anything else - steer clear of Tesco 99, car didn't seem to like this much.
Some other observations:
I have to fix my drivers seat twist soon as it's a bit too low and I ended up playing around with the seat position a lot and got a bit of back ache as a result.
Brakes - yes brakes, is it me or does anyone else have this issue? Brakes are pretty rubbish when cold but if you get them warmed up, say pulling down from around 100MPH pretty quickly then they're great. Getting the pads warmed up made a heck of a difference, the brakes are great when the pads are hot.
Warm-up in general. The engine gets to temperature pretty quickly but it seems to take longer for everything else to get up to happy working temp. Steering, gear changes (steptronic on my car) and brakes seem to take a bit longer but when properly warm, after around 20 minutes or so everything seems fine.
I also had the car partly detailed whilst in Norfolk, have a look at http://www.refinedreflections.co.uk and check out the 850CI - it's mine. I can thoroughly recommend using this company, Gary the owner is a genuine guy and quite a petrolhead too - used to play around with Scoobies. He spent around 6 hours working on my car and did a fantastic job. Only trouble is, after another 1,000 KM on the road it wasn't looking to refined - around a kilo of accumulated flies on the nose and front screen.
Speaking of nose and the rest of the car for that matter - stone chips! B@stard things - seem to get around one a day, some of them in really wierd places. Anyone else have this problem?
Anyway, enough of this drivvel for now.
cheers,
Jason
