Yes!!!!!
We finished 76 in the 4x4 category out of 200 who participated.
PANDA RAID 2018 by vdE Racing Team
We just arrived after a long and very difficult day. Almost 9 hours drive with +40°c through very tough roads/pistes.
Today our front suspensions have decided to give it up which makes is extremely difficult to maintain a decent speed on stone roads.
The environment is really beautiful
Yesterday we achieved to be between the 50% cars with the highest scores.
We just arrived close to Erfoud. A great place in the middle of the dessert. Again car is performing great and I am really surprised what it can do.
We repaired the booth so we can have clean clothes again. Very warm +35°C and blue sky. Yesterday we go is finished just bellow 170 in the clarification taking in consideration that we lost during the exercise we are satisfied. The feeling we have is that today we achieved much better.
Tomorrow will be a challenging day with 269 km piste.
After some days without being able to write because my cell phone decided not to work...
This experience is being amazing so far and the car is like a miracle. It still works and the only small issues we have had so far are: 1 flat tire, the booth which does not open well anymore, the driver door which does not close as it should. But mechanically it is just amazing.
It is great what we are experiencing as the first day we had a big sand storm which increases the car with 10 kilo of sand and yesterday we had our first experience driving on fast "pistes" and sand. Just great to see what we can achieve and see how the local people in the mountains live. At night the second day it was - 3 °C and as you can imagine sleeping in a tent in such an environment is not what we are used to. No further comments...
Today it was a long trip of almost 7 hours through the dessert. Amazing is the only word I can find. Palmtrees, donkeys and dromedary were our guests on an extremely technical and fast trip.
Now we are in Merzouga where the big dunes are staring. Warm weather and beautiful sunsets. After the 3 rd hard day we are fine and the car is doing what we are asking him to do. I still need to get used to drive +80km/h with constantly hearing how stones hit heavily the carter protection.
If you want to see great pictures made by the organization you can visit the following Facebook page pandaraid where they have posted several pictures of us/car.
And last but not least yesterday we ended in the general clarification 196 (they still need to make some corrections on the final list as something was not correct). Today I guess we will be worse as in the specials we were lost in the middle of the dunes for 4 minutes.
Finally arrived at campbase 1. Nice roads but now it's raining. Great atmosphere. The car is perfect so far.
You can follow up instantly and look where we are on the pandaraid.com site. Our car is number 230