Looking good while driving frugally

It was a weekend any motoring journalist worth the high octane gasoline in his veins would look forward to. I had no assignment, no coverage and best of all, Lito German, the corporate communications director of BMW Group Philippines had scheduled me for a weekend test drive of the BMW Z4. I had my weekend plans set and was day dreaming of driving the Bavarian sports car down a lonely mountain road with the top down and the wind blowing in my hair.

But fate (and my editor) had other plans. At the last minute, I was assigned to run in the Media Guests Category of the Shell Better Mileage Gasoline Road Challenge. I tried to borrow econocars from car manufacturers to be competitive in the fuel economy run with but they were already out of media units. Without a viable small displacement econocar for a ride, I called BMW and told Lito that I will run the 2.5-liter BMW Z4 in the Road Challenge, forget about topping any mileage record and just look good during the drive. Being the nice guy that he is, Lito instead offered me to drive the BMW 120 instead of the Z4. "Dude, you may have a better chance of winning with a 4-cylinder engine (compared to the Z4’s 6-cylinder). You may not win the fuel economy run against the smaller cars, but you’ll still look good driving a BMW, albeit a smaller one", he advised. "Besides, we want to see what this baby can do", he added, referring to the 2.0-liter 1-Series’s fuel consumption. So off I went to the Shell Better Mileage Gasoline Road Challenge driving a Bimmer. What a great start!

On an early Sunday morning, I loaded my wife Shawie (she was my navigator) and my daughter Vette (she’s my good-luck charm) into the BMW 120 and proceeded to the Shell station at Fort Bonifacio. On the way there, I diced with a driver of a Ferrari Maranello 550 who must’ve been irked that a 4-cylinder German hatchback dared to challenge his V-12 Italian GT machine on EDSA. I overtook the silver GT on the bridge in Guadalupe but he stormed pass me after the Rockwell overpass. Duh! Driver, wife and daughter in a 5-door 4-banger against a single occupant in a two-seat twelve-cylinder GT — you do the math. Of course, I lost! But he had a hard time shaking me off his tail. And besides, we were turning into the Fort anyway… (Kids, please don’t try this at home. Racing is done by professionals and should only be held in a controlled environment.)

Still smug from the impromptu road race, I got into the Road Challenge registration area at the Fort, drove the Bimmer into the Shell station, had the car inspected, checked the air pressure of the run-flat tires, loaded up with Shell Velocity until the brim of the fuel neck, and had breakfast with my family. While waiting for the flag-off, I checked out my competitors from the media, majority of which were driving either a 1.3-liter Honda Jazz or a City. Seeing their fuel misers, it slowly sunk into me that I would never win this Road Challenge with a high-performance 2.0-liter engine. After a short wait, the marshals started flagging off the cars and the race, er, the fuel economy run was on!

Well, actually, it was more than just an economy run. There were also some small nifty challenges that the organizers threw in to add excitement to the contest, ala Amazing Race. There was shopping at the Select Shops, getting clues and directions from designated checkpoints, putting together a giant puzzle, strategizing how to breeze through a toll booth (to conserve fuel), and finding more clues in the classified ads of a news paper and along a corn stand along the highway. The challenges were, for the lack of a better word, challenging and were enough to drive the drivers and their navigators batty.

The fuel economy run had stops and check points at the Shell station along the South Luzon Expressway and at the Shell station in Sta. Rosa, Laguna and ended at the Shell station in Tagaytay City. The awards were given at a barbeque-style lunch in Tagaytay with Iñigo Roces and Chris Van Hoven of C! Magazine taking home the top prize in the Media Guests Category for squeezing 35.52 kilometers from a liter of Shell Unleaded using a Honda Jazz with a manual transmission. The husband-and-wife team of Oscar and Heidi Nuke took first place in 1500cc and Below Category, squeezing 53.01 km/l from their Toyota Echo while Marlon Angeles and Fe Ilano won the 1600cc and Above Category by averaging 16.05 km/l with their, ahem (believe it or not) Mercedes Benz 600SEC with a V12 engine. Geez, this is indeed one for Ripley’s.

So how did the BMW 120 do? Well, it did 14.197 km/l sans A/C (cool morning breeze, and besides, it’s chilly in Tagaytay) and with my frugal driving. My wife just couldn’t get used to seeing me driving soooooo slow at the toll ways in a BMW, with cars zooming by us instead of us whizzing by them, but at least we bested a Honda Jazz driven by a fellow motoring journalist who did only 7.68 kilometers to a liter, and another Jazz media entry that did 14.129. (You know who you are.) And of course, we did arrive in style, second only to that couple who drove in with that big, honking V12 Mercedes-Benz. But what fun we had!