Day 2 scraping in

But that’s the time by which we scraped in to avoid a late penalty after day two – the toughest day so far – in the Global Green Challenge.

We were given a maximum time of nine hours to cover the 668km from Katherine to Tennant Creek. The slower you go, of course, the less fuel you use, but go too slow and you get penalised.

On day one, fellow Carsguide co driver Chris Riley and I got to the finish with 11 minutes to spare and we thought that was a close call. Today it was just a minute. That’s too close.

And that was after a day of continuously doing mental arithmetic to work out the distance run against travel speed, and the time we needed to be at the finish – keeping in mind we had to maintain fuel efficiency in our Hyundai Santa Fe, which is working out to be an impressive wagon.

The Santa Fe, which goes on sale next week with a new engine and six-speed manual or automatic transmission, has been turning heads everywhere we go for the frugal fuel consumption it offers for a SUV.

This turbodiesel 1.9-tonne vehicle with constant four-wheel drive has been running all day at just 5.5l/100km. For several hours we got the average down to 4.9 litres before strong headwinds slowed our progress. That’s remarkable considering we experimented and ran most of the day on cruise control.

The other Santa Fe in the team, driven by rally veteran Ed Ordynski and motoring guru John Cadogan – who won the Challenge last year – has been doing marginally better. For the second day in a row they beat us, by using less than half a tank of diesel over the 668km course. We will be out to make amends tomorrow.

It was another tough day, running without the air conditioning to save fuel as the temperature soared to over 40 degrees. It’s also been a day we saw a lot of road kill, black skid marks on the highway from heavy braking and dead cattle on roadside have sadly become a common sight. But in nature’s way, the hawks and crows are efficient cleaners, leaving only bones behind.

Today’s result proved interesting.

The winner of the Global Green Challenge is the vehicle which, over the 3000km journey, records the biggest gain over its official fuel consumption rating. So all cars, from a thumping V8 ute to a three-cylinder micro are on an even footing.

As predicted, the large cars are doing well because they have greater opportunities for fuel consumption gain.

After day two, the HSV V8 Maloo ute has a commanding lead in the production car class with a 47 per cent improvement. Ford’s Falcon six-cylinder XR6 is second with a 39.5 per cent gain, followed by Holden’s Sportwagon with 33.5 per cent and Skoda’s prestige diesel powered Superb on 32 per cent.

We are sitting in sixth spot, up from 10 on day one, with a 21.2 per cent gain.

Our teammate is fifth on 21.7 per cent..

Tomorrow we are off to Alice before the Global Challenge heads for Adelaide.