Syd Stelvio – Sahara Challenge - Day 8 – Ouarzazate to Marrakech – 217km

Eight days into the rally, eight days of pushing the car from morning to evening, concentrating on the road or the track, or being head down in a road book, only lifting your eyes to look at the trip or your watch. It’s been an intense week, but respite is just over the horizon, because at the end of this eighth day there is a non-transit day, a day out of the car.

The rally isn’t ready to let up just yet though, day eight may only have had 217km of competitive route planned, with a finish sometime around 2pm, but with five planned competitive sections split over three regularities sandwiched between two STC’s it was going to be a flourish of a finish to this part of the adventure. Re-joining the rally today were the twin Ford 48’s of the Hwaidak brothers, with Sherif and Amin managing to fix both cars. Their rally was always meant to be a test for the greater challenge of Peking to Paris next year, and so rather than be downbeat about the need to lose days of the rally to mechanical problems, they were pleased to have found the issues with the car and can now set about strengthening them for the challenges ahead.

Unfortunately, the first-time control section, that was planned for the desert just outside the movie city of Ouarzazate, had to be cancelled as the track was just too rough, with a re-route around the entire thing. This gifted the crews a somewhat more leisurely start to the day, with a 113km run on stunning canyon roads to begin a quickfire section that contained all of the day’s competition, with each part split only by a few kilometres or so.

The first was named Top Gun, a reflection on the scenery perhaps that could have been straight out of the film. There were no fast jets around, and anyone who felt the need for speed would need to keep a lid on it, and stick to the prescribed regularity average, although with a steep climb up hill, some of the slower machines may have been wishing they had afterburners.

Reg one was dispatched with minimal problems, with pretty good scores for everybody, with the third placed Bentley of Raj Judge and Monu Singh landing the biggest penalty for being 25 seconds early into the control. Reg number two followed after a short drive down the road, and contained a nice little detour off of the main road that would catch out any navigators that weren’t quite on the ball, and this might explain the plethora of one-minute penalties that were incurred at the first and subsequent timing points on the section. One crew who may or may not have missed the detour, made up for it by making a detour of their own. Car 30, containing the always smiling Schultz Brothers, somehow ended up stuck in one of the more water filled Wadis on the reg. It’s not obvious how this happened, perhaps they became confused about their ex-Military Police Volkswagen 181’s previous life, and thought it was an amphibious landing craft, or maybe they were just laughing too much about something and missed the track. Either way, they were beached for the time being and would chock up maximum penalties on the section.

Regularity number three was next up just three clicks after the finish of two, and anyone who had been looking around would have realised that we were beginning to climb now, and indeed once this last reg was dispatched the route climbed in a big way, up a steep gravel escarpment on a series of switchbacks. The last time we were here the weather had closed in and by the time we had reached the plateau at the summit of the ascent, we were in the clouds with the precipitation materialising in front of our faces. Thankfully today the sun was out, and the vista was tremendous, as the crews rumbled slowly across the gravel, hopefully taking a minute to look around before the days final act began.