The 2026 Kidney Kar Rally is officially complete and we made it across the finish line.
All up, the rally raised $411, 607.00 for kids battling with Kidney disease. Our team raised $13,387, with donations still arriving through out the rally.
A heartfelt thank you to all our sponsors. On the rally, I spoke with a father and daughter team from coastal NSW. The daughter is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant and goes for dialysis three times per week. She is under 30 years of age. On the third day of the rally, she did not attend and her mother stepped into navigate. She has been on the waiting list of a kidney transplant for years and is scared to miss any phone calls, in case it the call saying that a kidney is available. They have made the decision that if one is not available by the end of the year, then her father will give one of his kidneys to his daughter.
When you talk face to face with someone who is living it versus reading about it or being told about it, the reality and the severity of the situation really hits home. On the last night, expressions of interest for the 2027 rally were requested and we have signed up again for 2027.
Now for the results of the rally…..
The scoring of the rally works like this: During each day, we drive either 3 or 4 stages. There are volunteer officials at the start and end of each stage. They record your start and finish time. Cars leave the start at 1 minute intervals. Each car is fitted with a rally safe device (https://rallysafe.com.au) and if you go above the legal speed limit, the device gives you a warning and excessive speeding is reported and penalised. So, the trick, is to keep speed in the corners and the organisers try to select roads with lots of turns. At the end of each stage, the officials work out the average time taken by all cars to complete the stage and the car that was the closest to the average time taken is declared the winner of the stage. If you are within + – 1 minute, you do not lose any points. If you + – 2 minutes, you lose 1 point, + – 3 minutes, you lose 2 points and on it goes. The maximum amount of points you can lose per stage is 10 points.
I have never seen so many exceptional people trying to be average!
We just drove, tried to push ourselves a bit and did not worry about playing the numbers game and trying to get the average.
As you will see below from Day 3, Stage 1, the average time to complete the stage was 1h25m21s and we completed the stage in 1h20m06s, so we lost 5 points.
For the total rally result, we placed 22nd, so we have plenty of room for improvement…if we want to be average.. 😊
We have a few issues to fix with the car. Our driver’s side front shock blew out on day three and oil went everywhere. We have a crack in the windscreen from the driver’s side bottom corner going up to the rear vision mirror. A dent on the passenger side front guard needs to fixed and we will need some new tires for next year.
I have also included a picture of the road book that we use to navigate. There are two measurements: accumulative and interval. As you pass each instruction, you reset the interval counter and the navigator tells the driver what is coming up next. Some instructions are 200m apart, others are 10km apart. So the navigator has some work to do….
Thank you again for your sponsorship of Tubesters United and I hope you have enjoyed receiving these updates. This year, there were three teams in the rally driving their standard 4WDs (Nissan Navara, Toyota Hilux and Toyota Landcruiser). If any of you are interested in participating next year, I would be happy to help make the introductions.
