2026 Team Beer Group Pressure

27/06/2026

Final day of the Sh*tbox Rally
Day 7 saw us leaving down the pack again so we had a bit of time to kill. We hid our Bluetooth speaker in the back of the Lochiel Locos Kia Carnival. As the locos drove out from the start, they were regailed with Baby Shark on repeat at full volume. After a while we change things up to Big Red Car!!! They showed their appreciation over the radio 😁😁
Day 7 was mostly sealed, but the unsealed part was some of the best fun driving on the whole rally. We went live on a few parts of it.
Then a quick stop for a beer at Royal Hotel Herberton and down the range.
About 460km done of the 518, Serenity decided she had had enough. We started to lose all acceleration, gear changing was all over the place, and we couldn't get more than 60km/hr. The support crew mechanics happened to be right behind us, so we got them on channel 14 and told them the symptoms. The recommendation was to put it in neutral and give it lots of revs then nothing, and repeat 3 or 4 times. It worked!!! It cleared some of the crap that the fuel filter had picked up, and gave us our power back!!!! So we knew what we were doing Saturday morning.
We made it!!!!!

26/06/2026

River cruising on day 6 of the Sh*tbox Rally

26/06/2026

Sh*tbox log, starday 6, Karumba to Chillgoe. The NCC Serenity performed wonderfully on this mainly dirt leg. On this one there was no fuel available at all, so we had to make sure we had a full tank and 2 full jerry cans to start, so 95 litres total. 569km and we are getting 16L/100km = 91 litres of fuel, so cutting it close!
Going slower certainly helped, the fuel usage was better at 80-90km/hr. The only issue was that we left at the tail end of the list, so we ended the stage in the dark and rain. We had to apologise to team Still Broke because our normal headlights might as well be birthday candles. So we had to have high beam on all the time, no matter how close we were.

26/06/2026

25/06/2026

Day 5 on the Sh*tbox Rally followers, was McKinlay to Karumba. A fellow s**t boxer turned 55 on day 5, and we did 555km!
We got to the Sunset Hotel just in time to watch mother nature's show.
We both have our fishing rods with us so we headed down to the boat ramp to see if we could get a Barra. The local guy told us it was no fishing, but said if we went up to the next street it came out at the beach and we could fish there....
OK, dusk, croc country, standing ankle do in water, potential fish on a line being reeled in to us.... no thanks!
So we had a beer at The Animal Bar-Karumba instead.
When we nearly got to camp we stopped to help another team that had run out of fuel, and picked up a rock in the brakes. So we had to get it out from being the guard. Easily sorted.