31st October - UAEDC Day 5

The final day is split into two special stages, with a road liaison between. And whereas we have had generous limit times on the preceding days, the timings on Day 5 are tight because we have to get to the ceremonial finish to meet the TV schedule. The other problem is that the service point at SS5 finish is a huge distance away by tarmac, so we have planned an off-road route, which means we can’t take the 2WD pick-up. Instead, Gip will take Maurice in his FJ, and hope to get through in time, while Cesar loads up the pick-up and heads for SS6 finish.

SS5 starts with some nasty drops, one of which I manage to miscalculate, and we land hard. There’s no obvious damage, but shortly after the flexible inner wheel arch comes loose on the font right, and starts to flap around – the tyre must have touched it in our hard landing. I decide to ignore it, then seconds later the engine dies completely. No electrics – nothing. I leap out, look under the hood, nothing obviously wrong, the battery is still in place and connected. I’m in a state of panic, what the hell can be wrong? Suddenly I realize that the only thing that can kill the car this way is one of the three emergency cut-off switches - and the wheel arch liner has flapped around and hit the one on the right wing! I rip the liner off completely, re-set the switch, and sure enough the engine fires up – hurrah! I’ve lost 5 minutes, and that’s a lot on a short stage. We reach the finish without any further dramas, and Gip arrives as we’re airing up the tyres. Maurice only has time for a quick check before we’re off on the road stage to the start of SS6, which we make with only minutes to spare.

We’ve practiced SS6 a few times and feel confident that we know the route, and we make good time, continually dicing with Fadi in his gold coloured Range Rover. Finally we are into the last dune section, with many tricky low dunes, still on Fadi’s tail. We’re OK for time. Then – disaster! I high-centre the Patrol on the crest of a dune, a beginner’s error. Out with the sand ladders, do some digging – but two diagonal wheels are spinning. Out with the jack, I lift up the front right and now the rear left has some purchase on the MaxTrax. The two remaining MaxTrax go under the front right, back-to-back, lifting the wheel another 3” or so, and after dropping the wheel onto them they provide enough traction on that corner to get us moving. We have 12 minutes left on our 3-hour limit time to do 12km, but now we’re out of the dunes and into a stretch of awful tussocky dunes, littered with shrubs and impossible to drive fast. The car bangs and crashes around, we haven’t taken the time to secure the sand ladders and shovel, Sheila is shouting at me to slow down and I ignore her, the red mist is upon me and all I want to do is get to the finish within 3 hours. We emerge from the dunes and spot the line of red cones leading to a left turn between some bushes, which guides us into the finish. I slide through the turn, but it’s sharper than the drawing they gave us, and we’re outside the cones again as we exit, but now I can see the flags, I weave back onto the track and suddenly we’re there. But have we made it? HAVE WE MADE IT??

The card is stamped, the finish time is recorded, but I can’t bear to look. Sheila tells me it says 2 hours 55 minutes – we’ve made it! I fall out of the car high on adrenaline and exhausted at the same time, people are congratulating us, everything becomes a blur. It’s over. After five days of excitement and disappointment, the highs and lows of rallying, it’s over. It's all over.

Later that evening, after the cermonial finish and the prize-giving dinner, we find that we are 14th overall.

Not bad for a first attempt by a bunch of amateurs!

30th October - UAEDC Day 4

Day 4 start is only a 5 minute drive from the bivouac. The route heads west, then south through some huge dunes with many difficult slip-faces and bowls. I’ve driven this stage several times and relish the challenge! We start overtaking people even before we hit the southerly leg, and then suddenly we’re into a scene of carnage – competitors vehicles everywhere, some stuck, some uncertain how to proceed. I plough in, down to a soft bowl, realize that I can’t go forwards, so make a U-turn to try and escape parallel to my entry. But I’ve lost all my momentum, and our escape attempt stalls. I hit reverse, planning to get some altitude to gain momentum for another attempt. But as I reverse, I feel the tyres start to grip – so I floor the throttle and the car shoots up the dune in reverse! Reaching the top, I calmly turn the car round and carry on, leaving a dozen drivers watching in open-mouthed astonishment at this audacious manoeuvre. As we exit the high dunes and reach the subkha to head east, I still can’t believe what I’ve done. We’ve passed almost half the field in the space of 15km.

From this point on it seems we can’t put a foot wrong. We cross each succeeding dune ridge with ease, and although some of the cars we’ve passed end up re-passing us, most of them come to grief later on, and we pass them a second time. The blue Bowler Wildcat comes past like I’m standing still, and disappears into the distance, so we’re not going to catch him. Then I see another Patrol stuck ahead of us, so I back off and reverse to find a way past him. BANG! Oh shit, where did that Pajero come from?? I’ve reversed into a car I had no idea was there. It looks like only the bumper is damaged, we shout apologies through the open door, but I don’t want to waste time getting into a post mortem right now so we head off. I feel guilty, but hey, this is rallying and dinging a bumper is hardly a hanging offence.

To the east of the Crescent now and we’re into some horribly soft white dunes, and the blinding sunlight reflects off them, giving no sense of perspective. It’s too easy to make a nasty mistake, but taking it carefully in 1st gear, our Coopers pull us through without a problem. Then it’s into some easier plains, with only occasional dune ridges, before we end up reprising the closing stage of day 1. And on the last dune of the day, there is the blue Bowler – they’ve had a stuck and are just putting the sand ladders away. I power past them, determined not to let them overtake us in the final 5km before the finish!

We know we’ve had a good day, we’ve passed so many cars and not had a single stuck. It‘s only later that we find out how good – 13th on the day! It is to be our best result of the week.

More rips are appearing in the front cross member, and Maurice and Cesar are kept busy fabricating more ironmongery to hold it together. It only has to hold for one more day..

29th October - UAEDC Day 3

Day 3 promises to be a re-run of Day 2, following a largely similar route westwards from the Madinat Zayed Road to the Ghyathi Road. But it proves to be nowhere near as difficult and the only problem is a significant steering vibration which gets worse at high speeds. I guess that it might be the steering damper, and at the first PC pass a message to our crew to get a replacement. Arriving at PC2 Service, we find that Gip has had to go as far as Madinat Zayed to find one, and is still on his way back, so we abandon the plan to replace it at service. Our mechanics look under the hood and find that their hard work re-inforcing the inner wing has been completely undone by the desert – the brackets they’ve installed are broken! They set to fabricating a new bracket from the remains of the old one, while I wait impatiently. Finally they are through and we head off again, having lost a few places in the delay.

The route once again follows much of day 2 and we cross the Liwa Crescent road with another Patrol, 238, hot on our heels. As we head along a gatch track towards the next waypoint, Sheila is watching for the GPS to indicate that we’re within 200m of it, at which point the program will index to the following waypoint. ‘Got it!’ she shouts, ‘now go left!’. Which I do – but we haven’t actually reached the waypoint and we’re now heading across country over some very rough terrain. Suddenly, we find our route to the next point blocked by the local rubbish tip! I swerve to the right, along a dune, but the damned tip is still ahead of me and I can’t avoid it. I stop the car on the downslope, and in front of me is a mess of construction debris, concrete, tarmac, branches, old washing machines, and wooden crates. It’s not pretty and there’s no easy escape. I lower the tyres to 8psi and try to remove some of the rubbish so I can turn the car round, but once it moves I’m firmly stuck at the base of the dune.

We’re stuffed. It’s ‘phone a friend’ time. I get the our exact location from the GPS and text it to anyone who might be in the area – and minutes later our old friend Mike Smith from the sweep team calls me. He and Nobby are coming down the Ghyathi Road and will be with us shortly, the bike-recovery pickup which they were escorting has broken its chassis and is now hors de combat! Sure enough they arrive and Nobby positions his Jeep to winch us out. Sadly we are trapped by an unyielding piece of concrete and I can only watch as Dh640-worth of 3-day-old tyre is ripped to shreds. After re-positioning a couple of times, we’re finally free of the tip and we set about replacing the wheel with our one remaining Cooper STT.

The sun is getting lower in the sky as we head out through some rough subkhas towards the Moreeb Road, which we have to cross before looping back round to enter the bivouac from the east. By the time we reach the road, the sun has almost gone, and Ron Thompson (the chief marshal) tells us this last 12km is the most difficult stage of the day, and are we sure we want to do it in the gathering gloom? I tell him that we haven’t gone through hell to give up now, and we set off across the road into the high dunes beyond. It’s a tough stage, and we need the headlights from the start. But somehow we manage to get through it without a stuck, and arrive at the finish in total darkness. We’re only 22nd, but it could have been much worse if not for Mike and Nobby.

Back at the bivouac once again our mechanics open the bonnet, to find that their latest bodge has held together! They set about improving it further with some more ironmongery. The cause of our wheel wobble is soon apparent – not as I’d thought the steering damper. We’d simply lost all the balance weights from our front left wheel – coincidentally the wheel we’d just replaced. The other damage is of a rather more personal nature. Both my heels are blistered and raw from continual brake/accelerator/clutch action, and my bum is a painful red mass of blisters. The seat is only an inch or so above the floor, which in turn is another inch above the exhaust and my arse is getting barbequed. So after a shower I head off to the medical tent, where I am shown the correct military technique for dressing heels with a gaffer-tape bandage, and given some steroid cream for my nether portions. Neil, the chief M.O., gives me some gel cooling pads which can be frozen, and they are exactly the right size to fit under my seat pad! These will provide considerable relief from the heat over the next 2 days.
After a final check on the car, and a discussion with Ian and Gip to agree who goes where for Day 4, we head for bed.

28th October – UAEDC Day 2

Days 2, 3 and 4 are rated as the most difficult of the event. Our start on day 2 is inauspicious – only a few km from the start I manage to drop the Patrol into a Patrol-sized hole, and can only watch as all the remaining autos pass us by. From our 15th place start, we’re now flat last, and still trying to dig the truck out of its hole. Finally, with the sand ladders in place and the tyres down to 12psi, she comes free – just as the sweep team arrive! Sadly one of my new MaxTrax has buried itself in the dune and we don’t have time to hunt for it, so I ask John Mitchell-Ross to waypoint the spot, so that we can come back another day and recover it. We carry on, but the stress of the recovery has taken its toll on Sheila and she requires a quick chunder-stop soon after. This rather sets the tone for the day, and we manage to get stuck again at a point where several cars are already stuck and a sweep team is sorting it out. Thankfully John Tan gives our recovery priority and we’re out quickly, only to get stuck a few hundred meters ahead – I’ve accidentally put the transfer box from 4-low to 2-high instead of 4-high! But now it’s stalled and although the starter turns it’s not catching. I check the fuses controlling the ECU, pulling each one out, and they look fine. But when I replace them, the car fires up – it’s a miracle! Our final stuck is on a soft side-slope above a farm fence, where I manage to stall the engine, and I have to leave the engine to cool before the starter will turn over. More time is wasted getting the sand ladders out and deflating the tyres to 8psi, but finally I manage to reverse it through a barbed-wire fence, with one tyre off the rim. Replacing the wheel and disentangling the barbed wire takes more time, and when we finally reach PC4 we’re told that the final stage has been closed 15 minutes previously. We are despondent as we head home on the tarmac, we are the 21st vehicle to arrive and the first to be time-barred, and we make the mistake of not visiting the finish to get our card stamped. This omission will cost us some 5 hours of penalties – had we done so, we’d have ‘completed’ in limit time and got only 15-minute penalties for each of the missed waypoints in the final stage. It’s a mistake to learn from.

Back at the bivouac, it’s time for more repairs to the inner wing, as well as replacement of the steering tie-rod. We end up as 27th on the day, it’s a disappointing end to a difficult day – but we’re still in the race.

27th October – UAEDC Day 1

5.30am and we’re up and away, headed out through the early morning traffic to the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi for the ceremonial start. Our cars have to be in position between 7.30 and 8.30am, and while we await our turn to start we suit up. We avail ourselves of the hotel facilities, drawing strange looks from the smartly attired patrons of this exclusive 5-star establishment. Finally we’re away on a short road stage to the outskirts of the city, where the special stage starts. Cesar and Maurice have picked up the heavily loaded VW from our house, and await us at the start. Ian and Gip and the trailer were down at the bivouac the previous day setting up, and they plan to meet up with the service crew at the Service Point, halfway through the day’s stage.

I check the car again, deflate the tyres to 18psi, Sheila reviews her road book and we chat to the various competitors we know – Fadi, Glen, Mabbsy, Mark, Malcolm, and Luc and Luc, a Belgian pair that have been doing the Challenge since forever. It’s a time to renew old friendships and forge new ones – you never know when you’ll need a friend in the desert. There are three vehicles behind us which should be much quicker than us – Mabbsy’s FJ, Mark’s Team Saluki Buggy and a mammoth Kamaz 4911 truck. At some point they will surely get past us, and we just want it to be as painless as possible. Having a turbo-diesel pantechnicon inches away from my exhaust, driven by three homicidal vodka-fuelled Russians, is a bowel-loosening experience which I can do without.

As we line up at the start it’s a bizarre feeling to be on the ‘other side’ from the marshals with whom we’re worked over the years. They are all friends, and they wish us good luck as the seconds tick by towards our start. 3….2….1….and we’re off, the straight-six 4.8 making a lovely sound. We settle into what has been billed as an easy first day, plenty of gatch and sand tracks with a few dune sections. We get passed by Team FJ and Team Saluki , but we in turn pass Wolfgang’s Pajero within the first few km. Arriving at PC1, the Saluki is stuck in some soft sand, clearly unable to re-start from the passage control. We can’t believe our luck! There’s no need to stop at service, the Patrol is running sweetly, and we push on through the stage. Towards the end, we pass a few more autos in the soft HP section, and feel happy with our day’s work at the finish. Back at the bivouac, I’m astonished to find that we’re 15th overall – how did that happen? The Saluki is still out in the desert with engine problems, and sadly Tim has been medevac-ed out with a back injury from a hard landing in the FJ. Neither vehicle will feature in the remaining four days of rallying.

The mechanics set to work changing the oil for fully-synthetic, and discover that the front right inner wing is cracking up, allowing the battery tray to tilt alarmingly towards the alternator. They effect the first of what will be numerous repairs to this area. We commandeer a tent, attend the drivers' briefing, have dinner, and Sheila works on the next day's roadbook. Our inflatable mattress beckons and we sleep soundly. One down, four to go...

The Big Day approaches

24th October

Friday was documentation day, when all teams collect their rally documents and equipment from rally HQ at Mina Seyahi. We decided to go down early, and were through by 10am, having signed for our rented GPS, Iritrak and Sentinel equipment, and taken our rally stickers and service road book. We met up with an old friend Alan ‘Robbo’ Roberts from Australia, taking time out from his epic England-to-Australia bike ride to take part in the Challenge. (Check out his amazing exploits at http://hardwayhome.blogspot.com) Everything had to be fitted in time for Saturday’s scrutineering, so that took up the rest of the day. Our car number was 237, seeded 37th out of 40 cars, with another 3 trucks making a total of 43 autos.

25th October

Our scrutineering appointment was at 4.30pm, when our vehicle and all the equipment is checked to ensure compliance with FIA regulations. This is always a nervous time, but finally our Patrol was declared OK to race. The one thing we’d missed was to order a push-button switch for the Sentinel system – this is a car-to-car warning system, enabling competitors to warn another vehicle that they wish to overtake, or to warn that they are stuck in a dangerous position on rally route. Fortunately I had enough tools with me to wire up the new switch temporarily so that the system could be tested.

26th October

Prologue day! But first we had to pack up the service truck and the trailer, so Ian and Gip were kept busy sorting out what needed to be on which vehicle, while I uploaded waypoints from the service book to the GPS units, and Sheila took the dogs to the kennel. We have three support vehicles – Gip’s FJ with the trailer, Ian driving Sheila’s Prado, and the VW service truck.

There had been some speculation about the venue for this spectator stage which would determine the start order for the event proper. Last year’s venue was now a building site, and other alternatives had been considered and rejected. Finally we ended up using the Jebel Ali MotoCross circuit, a tight and twisty circuit which obviously suited the motos much better than the autos. The prologue was run in reverse seeding order, meaning we would be one of the first autos to tackle it. Walking the route we knew we’d struggle with our wide turning circle, and we were right – it was a bit of a disaster! Our only consolation was that we’d made up 4 places on our seeding, and the highly-favoured Team FJ and Team Saluki had fared even worse – they’d be starting behind us!

But as we got back to the race car after watching the rest of the competitors tackle the stage, we found that the front two tyres were completely flat – they’d obviously come off the bead as we’d gone round, and now refused to seal. We had to change both of them for our spares, and I knew that I’d made a mistake relying on cross-ply block tread tyres without tubes, as Saeed had always used. We had to change tyre strategy, it was already nearly 7pm, and we had to be in Abu Dhabi by 8.30am tomorrow. And the traffic coming back from Jebel Ali was stationary – how could we possibly get new tyres and have them fitted in time?

As I inched towards Dubai through a constipated mass of vehicles, Sheila got on the phone. I needed six new Cooper STT tyres, 285x75 R16, and tomorrow was no good. The Cooper importer is Renaissance Trading, who had always been very helpful in the past. But Jimmy, the manager, said he had them in his warehouse in Sharjah which was closed, and anyway his driver was off sick, and where would we find to fit them at this time of night? Come back tomorrow. But Sheila persisted, explaining why we had to have them tonight. Finally Jimmy rang back. He had five tyres in the showroom, and his second driver was prepared to come in specially and deliver them it we’d pay him something extra. So we agreed that he’d deliver them to a tyre fitting place in Jumeirah by 8.30pm where we’d meet him, and we continued to battle our way through the glacial traffic towards Dubai. I dropped Sheila off at home before continuing to Jumeirah, and met Jimmy’s driver. It was 8.30pm, but although City Tyres closed at 9.00pm they weren’t interested in doing any more work that day. So off we headed to Satwa, where Abdullah from King of Tyres was only too happy to fit and balance them. I reached home at 10.30pm, where Sheila had pretty much finished our packing so that we could set out early for the ceremonial start at Abu Dhabi the following morning. Sleep was elusive, my nerves were shot with the last minute tyre panic and I worried about 101 things that could go wrong with the truck during the race.