Day 13: Punishing ride for tires

Well, it's beginning to feel like a real rally. I'm writing this sitting on an aluminum case late at night outside while around me portable service tents (from Porsche, Suzuki and German off-road specialist ORC) hum away making repairs to cars that limped away from the day's 106-km long special.

The service crews are the real unsung heroes of this and any event. They spend all day on the road to be at the end when competitors arrive and work all through the night so the rally can continue.

A festival of hard-to-read ground conditions, sharp rocks and less than specific directions - you can go from A to B in Mongolia on your choice of at least a dozen different tracks - the stage took a particularly heavy toll on the Cayennes, with almost all the Porsches suffering some sort of tire-related difficulty. After driving faultlessly through most of the stage (the missed checkpoint was my bad), Kees and I suffered two punctures within about 10 km of each other and had a slow leak in the right rear.

Still, we were lucky to get away so relatively unscathed. The British team of Richard Meaden and off-road racer Neil Hopkinson punctured both a tire and their oil sump, rendering their car undriveable.

Well, what else would a couple of Canadians do? In return for them letting us mount their remaining spare on our Cayenne, we towed them the 300 km to camp, which took the best part of seven hours and only touched pavement twice. Indeed, both their car and ours are likely out there under one of those tents right now.

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