Emirates Desert Championship R4

After the last rally we needed a couple of repairs.  The expensive radiator I bought a few years back from Griffin in USA was definitely leaking, so I had a new one fabricated by Dolphin to the same design.  We were also spraying a lot of oil around the engine compartment, and Nanjgel found that we had an unconnected breather line, which is now relocated and has a nice filter on the end of it.  Finally a new oil temperature sender was installed.

I was planning to get a new compressor to power the rear diff-lock and provide on-board tyre inflation.  But after talking to the guys are ARB Emirates, it turns out that they could recondition my old ARB compressor for half the price of a new one - so that's result.  There are still a bunch of other jobs to be done before we get to the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, and my participation in R4 of the EDC was just about to make that list even longer.

We were back at the same track as R3, near Faqah, which has a bit of everything - medium dunes, flat subkha, and technical dunes.  There was a good entry list, with a total of 15 cars and buggies, but the rate of attrition was pretty impressive too.  Tom Bell, in his magnificent 'Stabbed Rat' LS3-engined Patrol came to grief with transmission failure - probably halfshaft or diff.  Georgy took the Saluki Motorsport SsangYong Musso and also failed to finish.  Emil's buggy didn't last the course, and I saw Tarek Abu Issa's yellow Yamaha buggy on its side.

My race was not without incident.  Going through the 'technical' section I noticed something fly off the front of the Beast and disappear behind me.  That turned out to be my GoPro camera, which we couldn't find.  Then something larger went the same way - that was the right-hand headlight - found, but broken.  At the start of the second lap, I managed (stupidly) to get cross-axled on a small dune, which required 10 minutes of faffing around with the shovel and the sand-ladders.  Then I noticed a crack appear on the windscreen, which progressively wound its way across the lower left-hand corner.  And an annoying noise from the back end turned out to be a knackered bush on the upper LH control arm.  The highlight of the event (which I would have captured on video if my GoPro hadn't gone walkabout) was an entertaining duel with buggy 320, Ahmad Al Mheiri's red and white Polaris.  He passed me just as I was re-starting after my stuck, then I got back past him on the subkha.  Then he overtook me in the dunes  - and this pattern continued right to the finish.  On the final lap, I managed to stick right on his tail through the first dune section, so that I could get past him at the very start of the subkha.  By doing this, I was able to pull a sufficient lead over him that he didn't have the opportunity to come back at me.

The upshot of all this was a second place in T1 behind Ali Al Fahim, and third place overall.  And a hefty bill for repairs, most of which need to be done this week  - as we have R2 of the EMC next weekend!

Photo credit: Wayne Gray