Hey itÂs Mark calling in! We made it to Atar, not ahh.. (laughs) not with out another great story! First off we started the day in a major sand storm. First 20 or 30 km you couldnÂt see your hand in front of your face, it was crazy! But we Ânailed the whole first 30 km all kinds of difficult navigation here. At some point there was only one track in front of us. I donÂt know if we were second on the course, but we were definitely the only ones on the marked course, the course the organizers meant for us to be on.
Anyway, 75km in to the stage everything was going perfectly when we had some smoke coming in and the smell of fuel. Believe it or not, we had to spend an hour repairing the car. It was just a simple; I donÂt know, I donÂt know if it was an injector line pipe we had to replace, I donÂt know why or what else at this point. So we sat for an hour and got that unit replaced and got going and passed everyone we could pass and went as hard as we could to the finish. They cut the stage short; it was supposed to be 500km. The last dune crossing today was at around 360km into the stage. We Âcleaned it and right up until the last 300m we got stuck there and we had to air the tires down and jack the car up a couple of times to get out. I donÂt know we lost about 15 minuets messing around there, but by then everyone else was Âchecked out and we were, our day was done, we were just trying to get to the finish. On the way to the finish, after that though, we came up on Ari VatanenÂs car and there was a big smoke cloud and in the foreground there was AriÂs car burnt to the ground. So that was a real bummer. Ari seemed pretty bummed about that. IÂm guessing that he had the same problem that I had, fuel leak, but I have no way of knowing that. Anyway thatÂs the kind of day we had (??? wind noise hard to understand??). I donÂt know how we did on the stage; we got 40th or 20th on the stage I donÂt know. There were a lot of people passing us when we were parked. But we will find out in a while, IÂm sure you find out, check on the internet. Thanks for calling in tomorrow is a rest day so you wont hear anything from me, maybe I just check in to say hi, (?? wind noise canÂt understand??) until then thanks, bye.
