the Walnut Diary

It was a hell of a wind yesterday evening, but Charlie had to get to Canadian Tire Motorsport Park just east of Toronto to play with his BMW and work as a Porsche Club of Canada instructor for the weekend, so he set off at 6:00 from the farm towing the 20 X 8.5 enclosed trailer loaded with his car and equipment. I checked with him at 9:50. He had just arrived.

The load-levelling hitch evened the suspension out pretty well, but the problem was SW winds were so high they had closed the airports in Toronto, and the Hamilton Skyway Bridge shut down as well because of wind gusts over 75 mph. Headwinds were a minimum of 30 miles per hour, with gusts passing 50 mph.

The 2004 Cayenne S pulled the bulky trailer through it well, according to Charlie. I asked him about the fuel consumption.

28.5 L/100 km. Normal is in the low 12’s for mixed driving. That was a serious pull over a relatively flat road. He did say it was very windy.

UPDATE: 6 May, 2018

This evening Charlie told me that when towing the trailer into in that 60 mph headwind, there was no change in engine effort when going down hills. I insisted that he check the engine oil. No change in oil level from before the vigorous exercise.