http://www.minirecord.n3.net
So what do you do if you're a Miniac and like to help a friend
raise awareness for his (terminal) disease ?
In case of Johnmar, a fellow
Lister of the Dutch
MiniList, you organize a world-size Mini-event.
That's how the Mini Record Attempt got started; a man and an
idea. Johnmar had the good sense to understand that this could
not be done alone, although he gave more than 200%, and with the
help of a few friends he managed to stage this event; a record
attempt of the largest traffic-jam of a single make car.
Most people would take about 2 years to get a show this big on
the road. He did it in 20 weeks.
As you can understand from the above I have a lot of respect for
what he accomplished and am proud to have been able to attend and
contribute my (extremely small and mostly done by Kiki :) part to it.
Sunday the 17th of June 2001 was D-day. In the days and weeks
before Johnmar and a couple of his friends had worked their butts
of to get the ball rolling, helped by lots of Listers who 'spread
the word' and stuck flyers on every single moving (or even
non-moving) Mini in NL and far abroad.
The start as well as the finish of the event was sort of in my
'backyard', that is, if I'd been at home that weekend, which I
wasn't :) As it happens I was some 200km from home having a party
at friends. But that couldn't stop me, as distance also didn't
stop people from coming as far away as Belgium, Germany and the
UK.
In the end I clocked some odd 750km's that weekend, but well
worth it IMO :)
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| Lineup Carmen & Friend, Yvette & Roger(?), Arnoud |
My girlfriend Kiki joined me for what was her first Mini-event. We got up a tad late (so what else is new :) to arrive at the start (at the campsite of another fellow Lister; Edwin v Loenhout) 5 minutes before closing of the registration. I'm happy to say that I wasn't the last one in line this time around :) After registration we met with some 'old friends' (they're not really that old :), some of whom I'd met during the IMM two weeks earlier. We sort of missed the briefing, but as we had closely studied the instructions on forehand and most Mini's would be driving in front of us we guessed there wasn't that much we could do wrong :) Although the weather-forecast had been very grim for the day in the end we were quite lucky as it hardly rained while we were outside the cars, but really pissed when we were in them.
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| There're Mini's in front of me ! |
And there're Mini's behind me ! | Marc's TNT Mini (Not going anywhere fast :) |
After watching all the other Mini's leave it was time for us
to follow 'the troops'.
A traffic-jam it was supposed to be and a traffic-jam it was :)
Although it wasn't particular hot some Mini's had to take a break
from hurdling along the highway at about 2km/h :) to prevent the
engines from overheating (or so they said :). Having learned that
lesson during the London 2 Brighton Run in '93 (basically also a
big traffic-jam of Mini's :), I've made sure not to have that
Mini-prone problem again and was able to follow the flock to the
finish at the car-museum Autotron
in Rosmalen. There all the attendants were lined up in a special
section, that proved not to be big enough to hold all these small
cars so the rest of the parkinglot was also swamped with the
little cars.
We did a 'walk-about' (ok, so I was still a bit with my mind on the 'Austr(al)ian tour' :) and I a bit over-eager meet and greet :) (I ran towards a beautiful female mini-driver to hug and kiss her, taking the umbrella with me and leaving my girlfriend Kiki standing in the rain. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'll never ever do that again, Kiki, cross my heart and hope to die!!! :) After this cockup on my part we went into the museum to hear whether we had actually broken the old record of 645 Mini's the Mini Friends Harderwijk had set in 1998 and more importantly, what the revenues for the event were that would be entirely donated to a foundation supporting research and raising awareness for the ALS disease.
Well, did we ever! :)
The new record is now set to 973 Mini's (or any
other car of a single make :) and that's just because some 20
Mini's didn't make it to the finish in time.
And to top it all, the minimum amount raised (even more was
pledged) was a staggering Hfl 27.000,= (some 12.250,= Euro) !!!
Loads of fun, a new record and a cause well-served...
'Good show', I'd say.
Video's:
HvN Report (8Mb Mpeg, See
also Rene
& Tanja's site),
NOS News (6Mb AVI, no sound
:( )
and JW's
site
