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.