By Leow Ju-Len

BOY, HAVE I got egg on my face. Not the pebble-sized stuff that drops out of quails, mind you, but an ostrich-grade blob of yolk and albumin. It all began a fortnight ago when Shell organised a Fuel Stretch Challenge, and with the rather juicy prize of a round-the-world ticket up for grabs, I had to take part. Well, not just take part, obviously, but win as well.

The rules called for one driver and a navigator, and I surmised I would need a cunning co-driver and a car in fresher shape than my own, (t)rusty nine year-old nail. Instead, I roped in Jason, CarBuyer’s business development manager, and his well-travelled Suzuki Ignis Sport.

The Challenge for the 240-odd (of which, surely, we were the oddest) competitors went like this: Shell would top up our tanks, seal them up, then send us off on a round-the-island journey with nine checkpoints to hit and various tasks to complete. Then they would refill the tanks, calculate the mileage we managed, and compare it against the manufacturer-quoted fuel economy figures. The most-improved performance over the original economy claim would win.

One thought entered my mind: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Brisbane, Christchurch, Honolulu, Mexico City, and, er, whatever major city between there and Singapore, here I come!

After advising other participants not to bother showing up and telling every Shell person we knew that CarBuyer would win the tickets, Jason and I set about forming our strategy. Like any single-minded, indomitable competitor, we knew instinctively what the best way to win would be: cheat.

This, we did by unbolting the Ignis’ rear seats and chucking them out, along with Jason’s assorted clutter, in order to pare the car’s weight to the bone. Next, we popped round to Stamford Tyres to replace the Ignis Sport’s sticky but fuel-hungry gumballs with a set of 14-inch SSW alloys shod with narrow ContinentalPremiumContact 2 tyres, with promises of dinner for all involved after we won the Challenge.

With the car thus prepared, it would all boil down to our driving and navigating skills. Which is I suppose where we went wrong, because we started the Challenge by instantly getting lost in Geylang’s narrow, congested lanes.

Nor did foolish measures go untried, such as tailing container trucks in order to exploit the suction from their slipstream. This, rather stupidly, involved driving so closely behind a truck that we could smell what the driver had for dinner the night before, which is good for your fuel consumption but bad for your chances of living through the day.

Since cooling a car requires major energy expenditure, we drove without air-conditioning, and kept the windows up because that keeps a car aerodynamically slippery. The sweaty consequences can still be sniffed in Jason’s car to this day. I perspired so much, in fact, that even after swallowing a litre of 100 Plus, I never needed a toilet break that day.

We also inflated the tyres to 48psi, the better to keep rolling resistance from stealing our fuel (although when I say ‘we’ I mean Jason, since the nagging fear that pushing so much air into the tyres could make them go “ker-boom” made me keep my distance from the Ignis, on the pretext of looking for something to eat).

This had the effect, together with the Ignis Sport’s unyielding suspension, of having every microscopic bump in the road transmit a jarring shudder into the Suzuki’s cabin. It’s just as well that I drove as slowly as a mummy, and I mean of the King Tutankhamen variety. So agonisingly creakily did I apply the throttle that the Ignis crawled away from traffic lights as if pushed along by a faint breeze.

To sum up: the whole exercise was hot, it stank, and my leg hurt from not being able to rest my right foot on the throttle. But the suffering would all be worthwhile. Except it wasn’t, because Team Scuderia Stamford

Suzuki CarBuyer walked away from the Shell Fuel Stretch Challenge with precisely nothing to show for it. Instead, the top prize went to the team of Shell customers Liew Chin Foo and Andre Ng Wye Hoong, who wrung a scarcely-believable 37.84km per litre from their Hyundai Sonata. That trounced our score of 23.77km per litre somewhat, and ranks right up there with Jesus’ first miracle if you ask me.

Given that Shell chipped in $15,000 in cash and kind to the Assisi Home and Hospice after the Challenge, Jason and I consoled ourselves with the idea the event at least ended with all the goodies going to worthy parties.

You might even say we were good losers. Although I’m sure everyone I mouthed off to before the Challenge started would suggest that the description is only half right.