Now bear in mind the seven has a 21 liter tank capacity, my warning is when the needle o the gauge stops flapping around, that means there is not enough fuel in the tank to raise the arm on the sender significantly, or roughly about 3 liters left. I was running low on petrol, so i had a peep on the GPS for the nearest petrol station, the gauge was still wobbling at this point, so not really worried, off I go... I got there and it was closed, now the eiffel region is very pretty, but its not that densely populated, and the nearest big town is Koblenz, about 45km away. I had a look on the GPS for the next nearest one, still heading towards the autobahn to head north a bit before cutting west cross country. I got to that one, and it was closed too, never mind I thought, (needle not moving now.) i'll just add the reserve tank i cleverly keep in the back for such occasions.
What I didn't know until that point, was that when I cleared out he boot after le mans, I'd left the spare petrol tank sitting in the garage next to the other fuel tanks and explosive things out of the way, and forgot to put it back in. Oh dear (Or words to that extend.) I thought, and looked at the options for petrol stations, Mayen was the nearest town that I could remember seeing on a real map, but it was quite some way away, so i found one en-route that might do. It of course was closed, and on the hill into the next town, I started to get fuel starvation, it was all over just in time for me to get to the top of the hill and roll down into the village and pull up somewhere a bit better lit and off the main road.
It took quite some explaining to the ANWB control, as they had no idea what type of car I was driving, nor where I was, despite giving them the coordinates, town name, rough location, they just couldn't find it on their map, eventually with some googling, gesturing and bad spelling we found it, and an hour later the ADAC turned up with a spare can. I talked broken dutch, even more broken german, and nervous english, explaining that you have no fuel is quite simple, the procedure for getting new fuel seems harder, first you have to understand you need to pay for it, it will be eight euros, you must pay now. Then there is the paperwork, correcting spellings, and more signatures than a boy-band autograph session.
The guy was really friendly though, and he understood mostly what I was saying in dutch, not so much in english and he drove with me to the nearest petrol station as we determined it was actually about 25km away and that's pushing 5 liters of fuel allowing for getting lost and the hills etc. In the end it didn't seem that far and by 11 I was ready to set off.
I decided just to take the fast route home via Koln and Duisburg along the autobahn, rather than going cross country, it was a nice opportunity to test the top speed out. Acceleration is quite impressive until about 175kmh at which point its a second or so before each increment. Top speed is still undetermined, at around 197kmh i hit fuel starvation, i had this issue before and had to turn up the pressure in the regulator, but I expect its still a weak spot. That is still pretty fast though but the car is remarkably stable at this speed, i expected it to be a bit twitchy, but despite the air force hitting my head it was quite pleasant.
I got back to utrecht by 3am, but couldn't get into the garage due to a power failure and the emergency unlock thing not unlocking properly so the car stayed outside my house which wasn't ideal, the rain stayed off though thankfully.
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