O seguinte texto foi-nos enviado por Manuel Romão, mas quem quem se encontra na prova é José Romão

Update on the 2007 Peking Paris Challenge

Day 17 and we arrived today at Yekaterinburg, on the foot of the Urals, after an uneventful ride of just over 300 Km. from Tyumen. Tomorrow is a day off and everybody is preparing to do repairs on the cars and get them ready for the second half of the event.

Yes, would you believe it, we are already about half way on our road to Paris, even if a sign on the road today signaled Moscow 2304 Km!

The story of the event so far is the crossing of Mongolia to the west, from Ulaan Baatar to Altay, Khvod and Tsagaannuur, crossing the Mongolia-Russia border at Tashanta, which only opened to foreigners in 2004.

(Our Magnette at a sophisticated ger camp.)

Virtually every car has suffered from this uniquely hard combination and at one point there were some 30 cars stranded in the desert or broken down and being repaired in the villages. They are now slowly rejoining the rally, sometimes 3 or 4 days behind schedule but driving long non-stop hours to catch up.

Our little Magnette has also had its share of problems, mainly related to the front suspension and the low ground clearance. Early on the first day in Mongolia we  already broke a front shock absorber and the top “cup” mount and drove some 200 Km on those conditions. Sand was also a problem and we found ourselves stuck in soft sand twice during the day, one of them costing us some ¾ of an hour to finally get free, with the help from many equally stranded competitors.

Almost everyday, at the end of the day, we had to find repair shops to replace shock absorbers and bushes, weld exhaust manifold or pipes and a myriad of other small jobs. All this among sand storms that paralyzed GPS reception… The ingenuity of Mongolian “mechanics”, working on the ground, without tools or artificial lights (they all use their customer’s tools…), is truly outstanding.

But the event that cost us a gold medal was the shearing of an engine mount, 30 Km from the end of day 11. The fan blade hit the radiator and there was a water splash that fortunately caused the engine to stop. We were towed by an organization 4x4 (at 60 km/hour…, at the end of a 5 m rope over the rough track, broken head lamp and fog lamps, chipped windscreen, another broken shock absorber and the sump guard hitting the sump (!)) and delivered to a “garage”, which saved us from spending several hours stranded on the track waiting for a tow…

The radiator was severely ruptured and I had my doubts about whether it could be repaired. We left the car at the garage and were driven to the camp where we finally could setup our tent at 1 am. This was the scene at sunrise, Harry’s MG SA and tent on the foreground by the river.

After one unsuccessful attempt at fixing the leak, the car was ready by 6 pm the following day. But with one headlamp only and another 300 Km of extremely rough terrain in front of us, we decided to hire a flat-bed truck and traveled from 8 pm to 6 am the following morning to the border camp.

Unloading our car at the border using a natural ditch made the daily picture on the organisation’s website…

Unloading the car near the Mongolia-Russia border 

Since then we have lived the almost daily routine of re-welding exhaust pipe, manifold and sump guard. With no more front shock absorbers (they have proved impossible to source here in Russia and we will only get fresh supplies in Moscow over the weekend), the car bounces up and down, hitting hard on any small wavy road surface or large pothole. We have been driving real slow to prevent further damage.

Still, we moved a couple of places up the ladder and are now 9^th on the classics.

Please follow up the next episodes at the official site of the event on www.pekingparis.com

A real highway

After crossing the border into Russia, tarmac road