Teruel (Spain), July 19, 2013.– The Baja Aragon officially started today with technical inspection of the race vehicles this morning. The racing has started at the end of the afternoon, with a 6.75 km prologue that will determine starting positions for Saturday’s start
Driver David Bensadoun arrived last night ready to go, having left all of the testing to co-driver Patrick Beaulé and the specialists who designed and built the race car. That work was completed last night after three days of hard work by team technicians from both Rally Raid UK and ALDO Racing. New Michelin tires were fitted this morning and the car is now fueled and ready to go.
Technical Inspection can be a bit of an experience, as the car must fully street legal in the country where it was registered, England in the case of our Desert Warrior 3. European Union laws say that if a car is legal in its EU-member country of registration and insurance (England in this case), it is de-facto legal to drive in every other EU member country, such as Spain in this case.
But street legality laws vary from country to country, so that a Spanish inspector can cause some problems when he sees something that is not compliant with Spanish law.
“The Team ran into this a few times this morning, such as Vehicule ID Numbers that must be on a riveted plate in the UK, and must be stamped into the chassis under Spanish law. Fortunately, the officials quickly saw reason and signed and apposed the magic stamp on the form,” explains David Bensadoun.
The Friday race is called the Prologue and runs for 6,75 km just North of Teruel, and determines the starting positions of the Saturday morning start.. All the competitors in cars, Quads, Bikes and Trucks proceed by public roads to the starting point. After the race, everyone comes back to the staging area to debrief, lick their wounds, fix the cars and fill up with vital consumables for day 2 of the race tomorrow morning.
In today’s race, David found the car’s handling to be almost perfect, with only a softening of the rear rebound damping needed to make it perfect:
“When I applied the brakes coming into a corner, the rear end wanted to come around. That is great for hairpin corners but a bit of a handful on high speed sweepers.”
A fluid leak in the Power Steering system complicated matters further, especially in slower corners. That leak was fixed after the race and all should be normal for tomorrow.
Please contact Marc Cantin for more information, at m.cantin@netaxis.ca, or at 514 337 0664 after July 26.
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