Today was the first real day of the rally. We left the hotel promptly at 7:30am to line up at the mongolian border. As typical, by the time we got through, we were an hour and a half past schedule.
Shortly after leaving the border, we left the tarmac road for the dirt and got into our first timed stage: 25km of full assault of the desert road. The road was quite rough; mostly 3rd and 4th gear. I was too anxious and was driving too hot. This was my first time driving this car at speed in the dirt and the learning curve is steep. After a few big bumps that bottomed out the suspension, Hayden finally brought it to my attention. I was simply too tense and driving faster than I could process the terrain and properly react. So I backed off quite a bit to allow myself to recollect my wits and relax. Then Hayden informed me that I was driving too slow and I kicked it back up a notch. The final third of the stage was much better. I was beginning to understand the car and drive reasonably fast while maintaining control. We still got the fastest time overall!
Then we were able to drive on a long section of new smooth tarmac before getting back into the dirt. Unfortunately the engine was showing some problems. It was ok at lower throttle but then would run out of power as the main jets kicked it. We kept it slower to not damage the engine.
The second and final stage was a very fast 25km of straight dirt track. We ran it at about 100kph. As reflected in the results, we were very slow.
At the end of the day, we were the first car into camp. This is meaningless, but it feels good! As I'm writing, I'm waiting for today's results to be posted. While I feel fine with my own performance, there are a lot of very fast cars here this year. The level of competition is much much higher.
We opened up the carburetors and checked the jets. They were clean as a whistle. Maybe we just have shitty gas.
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