Reilly Traveling Circus

It is Day 8 of the rally and our first rest day. We are staying at the Silk Road Palace Hotel in Dunhuang. The past few days have been eventful. . . . And quite long. In reverse order, the high/low lights include 12 hours in the car yesterday. The morning was a drive through winding roads in the southern end of the Himalayas and was spectacular. Lots of switchbacks, a combination of paved road and gravel. We had to drive over a snowdrift during our regularity. We were advised to “keep the momentum up”. The low point of the day was the late afternoon drive over 63 km of rough gravel road, the first 38 of which were characterized as “very challenging”. That was an understatement. We scooped up a lot of gravel and took a few big thumps as we navigated wadis, ditches and highly crowned gravel. We were doing OK until km 31 when our car abruptly died. Some diagnostics from fellow participants suggested an electrical issue. No cell phone coverage and no rally mechanics answering the satellite phone. We were advised to wait in the middle of the desert for the mechanics in the sweep vehicle. After turning the power on and off with the master switch, the car came back to life, allowing us to roll into the hotel at 8:30 pm. The end of the day, however, was quite nice with the best dinner buffet we have had to date on this rally.

Day 6 was also a marathon. We had spent the night at our second campsite, rolling in late to 25-30 mph winds and blowing sand. Another night with inadequate sleeping mats, a flapping tent and to top it off: rain. It turns out that our tent was not completely waterproof, although Keith & Harry had no issues. Then it was off on a long day with a lot of gravel and desert landscape. Our car started behaving poorly, stalling at low rpm, making paying tolls and city traffic a challenge. I got to spend 90 minutes with three mechanics at the hotel trying to diagnose the problem. The root cause appears to be inadequate air filtration in dusty conditions. Not good for the engine. This resulted in a couple of clogged idle jets in our Webers. These were cleaned out and the car is much improved afterwards.

Today, we spent working on the car. The first order of business was to clean it. We had a lot of fun watching a very nice man blow the sand out of it, pressure wash it, detergent and scrubbing, followed by a rinse. At the same time, we sourced some transmission fluid to use to oil our foam air filters. On the advice of several participants and mechanics, we obtained some panty hose and have wrapped the filters with them to improve dust collection. We are now sporting a towel around our fuel filter and two sets of panty hose around the air filters. We also dealt with our ride height. We would benefit from some additional ride height to provide better clearance in the gravel. Visual inspection of our skid plate showed that we are getting our money’s worth. It has obviously taken a lot of hits. Dave Alcock, who has a lot of Porsche experience and leads the rally mechanic team, was gracious enough to raise the ride height of our front suspension. We also spent some time trying to plug up any openings in our engine compartment that would potentially allow dust in. Tomorrow will be the stress test for all of these changes. We are dealing with several route changes due to high waters in the river we were supposed to drive across.

It has been impossible to post anything from China due to their firewall restrictions. I’ll post this now (from Almaty in Kazakhstan) and then a new update.