Blue towels and blowflies

The towel – or more precisely, half-towel after it was split down the middle to share with the support vehicle – was used to shade the driver’s side as we drove from Darwin to Adelaide.

The driver being on the western side meant that after midday the afternoon blasted through the window with near-thermonuclear intensity.  And we were insisting on keeping the airconditioning off as we travelled, relying on the occasional allowance of fresh breeze to keep us cool.  Unrealistic? Perhaps. But effective in keeping the little car fairly comfortable and astoundingly fuel-efficient.

I shared the helm of the Alto for the first half of the Eco Challenge category route -- from Darwin to Alice Springs – with motorsport mechanics student Chris Smith from Kangan Batman TAFE, which had joined with Suzuki in prepping the car.  It didn’t take long to work out the first half was also the hottest half. But the Suzuki, and my co-driver, held up well.

We sweated, we nursed the fuel economy, we blessed the blue towel and we cursed the occasional blowflies who invaded when the window was open.  And the Alto micro hatch repaid us with a great performance. 

The other secret weapon was of course its weight. The tiny five-door tips the scales at just 850kg, to which my co-driver and I added another estimated 120kg.  And that was just us, and a few of bottles of water sitting in ice on the back floor.

The Alto’s other advantage when we hit strong cross-winds was its smaller profile, with it measuring 3.5m long and 1.6m wide.  The 1.0-litre engine is a 50kW/90Nm three-cylinder that has an official fuel figure of 4.8L/100km and a CO2 emissions figure of 113gm/km. But the five-speed manual version we drove in the Eco Challenge did much better than that, and we were sitting in under the 4L/100km mark for much of the trip.

The bars on the integrated digital fuel gauge in the instrument panel seemed to take hours to clock down, and while we didn’t have trip computer estimating the fuel economy we knew most of the time we were travelling fairly frugally.

At the Adelaide finish line after the city circuit through South Australia’s capital, the little Alto’s cumulative result was 3.91L/100km – an improvement of 19 per cent – and the CO2 emissions were calculated at 90gm/km.

We had gone easy on the anti-lock brakes, and didn’t need to use the full-size spare wheel, thank goodness, as a tyre change would have severely compromised our finish time.   And we didn’t even plug into the MP3 auxiliary jack for the audio system, so intent were we on judging the messages coming from under the bonnet and on the tacho.

But it has those all features. Oh, and it has airconditioning, too.

Global Green Challenge - Performance Report, 2009

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