Darlings of the Media

After having done precisely zero PR for the rally, we got a phone call from the nice man at Sport 360, our local sports daily. After a telephone interview at the weekend, a photographer duly arrived on Sunday afternoon to take some pictures of us and The Beast. We had to dress up in our rally gear and mime some fairly unconvincing rallying around Arabian Ranches, and allegedly this will result in our appearance in a pull-out DC supplement on Wednesday. Watch this space.

Today, German TV approached us to do a special on the only husband-and-wife team in the DC. They plan to do three video sessions, one pre-start, one at the start and another at the finish. This all sounds rather exciting, although I did have to promise to abstain from John Cleese impressions and avoid any mention of the 1966 World Cup for the duration of the event. When this 30-minute feature might air is as yet unknown, but we have been promised a copy of the finished piece.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Richard Bailey’s boss reneged on his promise to allow him time off for the DC and sent him to Norway instead (boo, hiss!). This is as much a blow for him as it is for us. However, under the pretext of recruiting for our Abu Dhabi F1 marshalling team, we met up with Ian Simpson. I promised him a week filled with adventure, excitement, travel to faraway places with strange-sounding names, and all the sand he could eat. He was easily seduced by my persuasive lies, and in a moment of madness signed up for a week of unspeakable hardship in the service of NewTrix Racing. So we now have a man whose CV highlights include ‘knowing one end of a spanner from the other’ and ‘being very good with tiewraps’. We’re going to try and build on this, and if he shows promise, we’ll introduce him to gaffer tape and binding wire. He will be driving the heavily laden VW Transporter from bivvy to Service Point and back every day, an essential if unglamorous role, and we extend the warm and sweaty hand of welcome to our new team member.

On the car front, we eagerly await the arrival of a heavy-duty sway-bar from Australia, having bent two standard ones into interesting banana shapes in the past. Our new rattle gun has arrived, to replace the old one. This has sadly endured greatly in the service of NewTrix, being run into by the dastardly French (boo, hiss!) and then destroying itself in an ultimately futile bid for freedom from its captivity in the back of the race car. I have managed to track down the correct GM belt tensioner to have as a spare, and hopefully a small pile of sale-or-return spares are waiting for me courtesy of the nice man at Arabian Automobiles, the Nissan dealer. The (Chinese) air-horns I installed before the UAQ solo race have died already, so I’ve replaced them with a pair of (Japanese) conventional horns which are equally deafening and seemingly less fragile. (Just don't get me started about the Chinese....)

The annual MOT (or should I say TRA) was also due this week, which meant Sunday was spent surviving the double whammy of a check-over by Rob Bryan at Bin Sulayem Performance, and then by the ‘experts’ at the Tasjeel. The first was no problem, the second – well, let’s just say I eventually got through without completely losing my rag.

That pretty much brings you, dear reader, up to date with the doings at NewTrix. The Phantom Blogger has once again been recruited to spread glad tidings of great joy (or not, as the case may be) on a daily basis during the event, so be sure to keep this blog on your watch list. Why not ‘Join this site’ as a follower? It doesn’t mean you’ll be deluged with spam, only that you’ll get an alert when a post is added to the blog. (Go on, you know you want to…)

Oh, and we're number 223 this year out of a total of 44 entries in the auto class. Go to www.abudhabidesertchallenge.com and you should be able to follow us through their live tracking - Inshallah.