Cyprus Rally is still a part of World Rally Championship. This year the event will start on 13th of May and will be held for the usual 3 days, finishing on 15th of May. Note that the opening ceremony will be on the 12th of May.The Official Site of Cyprus Rally 2005 already has all the announcements and the initial information. Make sure to read the Rally Guide, which is available in both PDF and MS Word formats. Stage maps and contestants’ entry list are still missing. Hoepfully they will be published later. Prices hasn’t changed since last year. One stage access is still 1 CYP, while the Rally Pass which gives access to all stages as well as Service Park is 15 CYP.
Tag: driving
The New Highway Code
Since most of the people I know drive cars, I thought that reminder of driver’s code was a good idea. Hilarios and with pictures.
Road tax saga
During the last few days everyone and their brother reminded me that today is the last day before police will start issuing fines for unpaid road tax. My budget for the next few months is tough enough without those fines, so I decided to take proactive measures. Few people warned me that I will need one additional paper – the MOT. MOT is a technical examination of the vehicle, which was introduced to make sure that all cars on the road have operational breaks, don’t emit too much of CO gas and stuff like that.
MOT examination can be taken in alsmot any garage, so I called up my mechanic and asked if I need to make an appointment. He said that the test takes about 20 minutes and that I can come any time I want without prior appointment. All I need to do is pay 25 CYP in any branch of COOP bank and bring him the receipt together with the insurance contract and vehicle log book. I did so and brought my car.
MOT examination is very well automated. Mr. Perry started up the sequence on the computer and followed the insturctions on the screen. All he had to do was to move the car a bit in and out of braces and rollers when the computer asked him to and place and remove all sorts of measurement devices on the engine and in the exhaust pipe. The test indeed took about 20 minutes.
When we reviewed the MOT report, my mechanic complimented me (why? :) ) on the engine of my car. He said that more than half of GDI engines that he and his collegues saw in Cyprus have all sorts of problems. They suspect that the problems are caused by software in the computer chip embeded, but noone except for the factory has any tools to tweak it. Anyway, he said that he has seen only about 8 or 10 cars which have good GDI engines and that mine was the best he has seen in the last 4 years. That, obviously, made me very glad.
With MOT report in my hands I went to the traffic department office. Somehow I wasn’t the only one who knew that today is the last day before the fines start. There were a lot of people. And I came late (about 10:00am). Traffic department is one of the worse organized ones in the Cyprus government. Most of forms are in Greek only. There is virtually no information posted anywhere. Queues to the clerks are totally uncontrolled and disorganized. You get the picture…
I spend slightly more than 2 hours in the queue before I got to the clerk. There were many British people in the crowd, who are a real fun to be around in the traffic department. They are fun, because:
- They are not used to queues and disrespect from the government offices
- They have a great sense of humor
These people were making all sorts of funny comments like “This must be the high priority queue”, “Is it a self-service department? I afraid I don’t handle computers so well…”, and (after staying on the same place for half an hour) “Did we move? I might have missed it. Can we do it again?”. My favourite was by a young guy who was talking to a woman for about an hour and than said: “I feel I know you so well! Would you merry me? We can ask for the certificate here. It is a government office, isn’t it?”.
So, after spending about two hours in the queue, I’ve paid 129 CYP for 1838 CCs of my Mitsubishi Galant engine. I am not afraid of the police patrols anymore. They can stop me all they want. Oh, wait, I have to change a couple of tires before that. Oops…
Tire care
Tires on my car are getting old and bald. Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to replace them now and driving like they are is not fun anymore. So I decided to swap the front tires with back ones to buy myself a couple of month.
I passed by the 24×7 tire care service. While one technician was swapping the wheels, balancing them and checking for other problems, I was talking to another one. He told me a few interesting things that I didn’t know or forgot about.
- There is a specification of how bad one’s tires can be. Police is actually cheching tires on the cars once in a while. Offenders are fined 50 CYP per tire. I thought that there should be a law about it and fines and everything, but the accuracy of the claim should be taken with a grain of salt from the guy who sells tires for life. Anyway, so far I seem to have one tire which is illiegal.
- In Cyprus, all cars older than 4 years must have an MOT check (mechanical compliance test). There is a fine for not having MOT certificate. But that’s not all. Without MOT certificate one can’t pay the road tax. Unpaid road tax is a finable offense by itself. And that is still not it. Without the MOT certificate, the insurance is invalid and non-enforcable. That’s right – if you will have an accident, your insurance won’t pay up unless you have an MOT certificate. Interesting, isn’t it?
So, all these news just show that I will be spending a bit more money in the near future than I wanted. Firstly, I’ll have to bring the car for service and get an MOT certification while I am at it. Than I’ll have to go pay the road tax. And than I’ll have to save some money for the tires. I need to buy at least 2 of those. All of these make an amount of roughly 400 CYP shine much nearer than the horizon. Oh, well… At least I enjoy every kilometer driven in my car.
On speeding
The other day I was listening to the discussion on radio about lots of people speeding in UK and police trying to have matter under control. Many drivers were questioned and their answers provided for some interesting feedback. I don’t remember the number exactly now, but roughly more than a half of them said that they were speeding repeatedly in the past and that they will drive faster than laws allow in the future. When asked about the methods to stop them, the answers were pointing at drastic measures, such as extremely high fines, prisons, and license nullification.
This discussion reminded me of my own thoughts on the subject that I had about six month ago, but never wrote down. Needless to say that a new storm of ideas happened in my head. I am taking this chance now to write it all down and get it out of my system.