Transsyberia Rally: Ryan Millen leg eleven summary

Day 11 -- Darvi to Altay

Hi everybody.

We messed up. Pure and simple, we messed up today--

Today started off great -- our navigation was right on. In fact, we wound up helping several other teams navigate the course. The stage was very, very fast and we were really tearing it up (perhaps a bad choice of words.)

We were running 4th on the stage, nose-to-tail, behind Armin (Schwarz,) Team Portugal and Lars Kern. We decided to take a route that took us around a small mountain, shortcutting the route and hopefully giving us an advantage over the top three in front of us. While in retrospect it turned out to be the right move from a strategic point of view and it did work for the teams who followed us, we, unfortunately found the one big hazard there was to find -- a six foot deep dried up trench.

We didn't see it until we were right on top of it and it was just too late to do anything but hope for a perfect "Dukes of Hazard -- style" jump and landing. But that's TV and this is the TransSyberia Rally. We wound landing nose-in, with our tail hung up on the opposite bank. Ouch. We were really stuck.

The Russians, Team Inteko, came by and pulled our Cayenne S TransSyberia out with their standard Cayenne S. Once we got them back on the road, we took a few minutes to survey the damage -- we had a broken lower A-arm and a blasted CV joint.

We managed to get the parts brought back to us and we are repairing our Cayenne. We will be back in the rally tomorrow, but the damage has been done in more ways than one. After all the time penalties, about 10 hours worth, we are now back where we started (or is that re-started) after our 30 minute penalty for taking a rear start, in 12th place.

It is really a shame. As I said, we were running 4th and had we not had our accident, we would have been close, if not into, the top 5. And while we are disappointed, we are definitely not dispirited!

Our Cayenne S TransSyberia is still running great and when the repairs are done, we are going to get right back at it - tomorrow is another day and it's time for us to get back to work.

Talk to you tomorrow!

Ryan & Colin

-credit: kgpr