Friday 23 May 2014

Useful driving hints for desert roads :)

Day 20 from our wonderful lodge in Etosha to a desert camp in Twyfelontein. A mere 400km across the desert.
Fot the next 3 + days we are driving  across the Namib desert, this is winter so it’s not too hot just over 36 degrees which is about 100 degrees in English.
The roads we use are quite well graded gravel roads. Namibia has 5450 km of tar roads and 37,000 km of gravel, think we are due to cover most of the gravel roads :)
There is a definite technique to driving on these type of roads. A lot of them have been graded using a huge levelling machine which is dragged or pushed across the surface. This gives the road a serious corrugated effect which makes the cars jump, which in turn makes the corrugations even worse.
The technique is to drive at a fast enough speed that the tyres actual jump from the top of one ridge to another. This speed varies all the time and also depends on the size tyres you have.
Molly has very small wheels/tyres. We have to drive at over 80 and up to about 100km to get the car to fly over the corrugations. Anything below this and Julie starts to lose her fillings. Anything above this and I start to lose my nerve. Once you have obtained the optimum speed you then have to try and steer the car with only a fraction of the tyre touching the ground, and if you try to brake then the corrugations really hurt the car and us. You have to concentrate 100% of the time or you're in trouble. At the end of 300km + you know you’ve been driving.
Another thing you must do is pump the tyres up until the side walls are straight up and down, any bulge in the side walls and you will probably get a puncture. the rally had 9 punctures in one day. Its not fun fixing a tyre in the middle of a desert in 100 degrees.
Some of the cars run on truck or taxi tyres. These have very hard side walls and very thick casing, theses type of tyres are very good for rough track roads. Unfortunately they don’t make this tyre for Molly so we have to run on standard road tyres pump up as hard as we dare. So far so good.  
Twyfelfontein is an extraodinary complex built into and around a rock outcrop in the desert, the view from the room is as far as the eye can see in all directions, only broken by a herd of elephants walking across the plain to the next watering hole.
We had dinner at 6.30 and in bed fast asleep by 8.30. This rallying is very tiring.  

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