How did we go to Croatia

“My friends, this won’t be a race. We’re just going at our own pace, ”we were greeted by a smiling Pippa and his family at seven in the morning on Friday in the parking lot of a gas station near Brno. I really don’t understand how he could be in such a good mood when he obviously had to get up sometime after 4am like the rest of us. That is, except for Honza Staňek aka Electro Dada (stupidly pronounced, we used to call him Electro Děd, but only behind his back!), who lives in Brno and so has been here for a bit. But we thought it unfair to start in Prague and, on the contrary, ask him to drive us first at night, then recharge and drive back again. Now you know why he started from Brno and not from the center of the known universe, i.e. Prague.

When the Honza charged up (it only needed a few kWh), we refueled and the beds were packed, and we could go. We still count on it not being competitive. Remember how Peppa laughed on TV because he had run 40 km and had to get ready to pee? Well, Saab and I, accompanied by Martin Mueller and chief of cameras Honza Percel in the Jogger, stopped at the next gas station. Martin had to jump back. To the big one!

Before the trip, I really wanted to maintain the fact that Michel and I would take turns in the Saab every two hours and would keep driving. But in the end we decided to take it easy, as if we were in no hurry. And when we found out in the popular chat where Electro Dad would be shipped, we decided to catch him there and have a little fun with him. We asked him what range he still had. And he drove a few tens of kilometers. “Well, we don’t have much either,” I smiled. “We only have eight hundred left.” In the end, you didn’t get to the final look of the piece. But an astute viewer might have noticed my red hood flashing in the shot when Martin is talking to Electro Dad at the charger.

Getting to Croatia on Friday wasn’t a problem at all. The only traffic jams we had were in Mikulov, a little bit in Vienna and Slovenia due to road rebuilding, but other than that it was smooth sailing. We have a tip for you – don’t leave your lunch break for the only “Mekáč” down the road, which is somewhere in northern Croatia. Even in the off-season, it was full to bursting, and waiting for that quick stomach-filling took precious minutes.

After all, it wasn’t until a moment before the finish line that we said on the phone that we were going to decide who would be first. We were, of course, because two guys at Saab don’t solve this much. We estimate we lost about an hour to the cut-off due to Martin as well as our two biggest breaks. We were at the finish line about half an hour ahead of the Tesla, but Electro Dad was just eating his diet and seemed to manage to jump comfortably while recharging. If we had driven as hard as he did, we would have been at the finish line an hour and a half earlier, which is a really big difference.

In the following video you can see several shots that did not reach the final look of the Autosalon: