Syd Stelvio – Sahara Challenge - Day 6 – Merzouga to Midelt – 454km

There was a clear definition in the field on day 6 of the Sahara Challenge, those that needed to fix cars and those that didn’t. For those needing workshops, this day, and possibly the next would be spent organising recovery to workshops, and then fixing gearboxes, axles or whatever else happened to be preventing further progress through Morocco.

For the rest of us, our road was taking us away from the sand of Erg Chebbi and upwards towards the Atlas Mountains, but before the cars could engage with any competition there was a long concentration run of 229 km to contend with. It wasn’t especially exciting and would see the cars retracing their steps back through Erfoud, before heading towards the sprawling mass of Errachidea, a garrison city of some 100,000 people that it seemed to take forever to clear.

Once out of its gravitational pull though, the road began to head up, plotting a path through the wall of mountains that consumed the horizon. The geology was incredible, with the layers of sediment that formed the rocks laid bare for all to see, each layer like a separate chronicle of history. In many places these layers were perpendicular to the sky, as if the rocks had been dropped into place, rather than forced up by huge tectonic activity millennia ago.

There was some much more minor tectonic activity going on in the middle of the first of the days four regularities, this being carried out by humans as a new road was being built. The upshot was that the road was blocked for large periods, and the second half of the reg needed to be scrapped and only the times up until the first timing point would count.

The second regularity was similar to the first, with a mix of tarmac and gravel as we continued along the Ziz Gorge Valley, and performances across the regularity were fairly uniform, with the majority of the crews keeping the penalties in single digits at each timing point.

As crews started to gather for lunch, which was a fabulous BBQ in a dried-up riverbed, everyone’s eyes were drawn to the sight of the number two Bentley arriving on the end of a tow rope. The fix to the chassis completed in the early hours had failed, and the crack had returned, leaving Tomas and Camelia needing a plan B to fix the damage.

Elsewhere car number 19 had suffered a pair of punctures and was limping on a borrowed wheel, and car 15, the Norwegian crewed Morgan, had broken a half shaft, agonising for Trond and Bjorn, who had retired at the same stage of the competition in 2022. They are currently enacting a fix for the car and are intending to re-join from Marrakech. There was also Gearbox issues for the no 11 Bentley, and car 37, the 911 crewed by Danish pair Torben Tolstoj and Birgitte Tolstoj Jensen had split an oil cooler. Some plumbing from the Mechanics bypassed the cooler, but the pair then found that the oil had coated the brakes, prompting a lengthier fix.

For everyone else the afternoon offered up more delights of the Atlas Mountains, with some wonderfully steep climbs and tremendous switchbacks. The transit sections were as entertaining as the competitive sections, as we passed through the remote villages that were scattered throughout the range. Here we encountered the locals, there were men returning from work in the fields, stacked up high on the back of flat-bed lorries, there were women guiding Donkeys who were carrying tremendous loads upon their backs, often with infants cradled about their person somehow, and there were handfuls of patchwork kids, some smiling and some with fraught pleas for charity, delivered through desperate eyes.

Again, the regularity performances were very good, and this was evidenced by the reasonably low and uniform leg penalties on the results sheet at the end of the day. The best of the day went to the flying Finns, Heikki and Heikki in the Fiat 124, with 23 seconds of penalty, but special mention must also go to Martin and Michelle Andrew in the number 16 Volvo PV544, who were best of the rest with 25 seconds, a fabulous effort against the more powerful vehicles, considering the amount of climbing that had been involved.

The top three overall and in the Classic category had not changed, but the Antipodean Chevy had lost ground on the Argentine Chevy in the race for first, after Tony Sutton and Andrew Lawson lost a minute on the final timing point of the day, having fallen foul of the oldest trick in the route planners arsenal, as they missed the classic loop off of the road to a timing point. With the regularity named ‘The Scorpion’ there was a clue that crews would need to be on their toes, to avoid any time-based woes. But speaking of time, there is still plenty of it, with half of the rally still to be contested. Time to be made then, and, time to be lost.

Syd