The two (!!!) teams that managed to complete the stage today claim it was the most beautiful Budapest-Bamako stage ever.

Unfortunately we are not one of the two.

In lack of enough power for deep sand we gave up after around 100 of the 600 kilometers and drove to the camp on a tarmac road.

Good news of the day:

• the battery replacement for the air flow sensor works in principle
• we managed to complete the stage and are in the camp in the middle of the dunes
• after 4 evaluated stages we are still second behind Team Játékshop (aka Gumisember)

Bad news of the day:

• the air flow sensor fix only works well below 2200rpm, we don’t have enough power for the higher dunes, had to skip a few points today
• our LED headlights don’t work anymore
• the camp today is quite difficult to reach, a lot of teams are still missing, including the organizers

Btw the organizers only arrived at 3am after a lot of shoveling in the dunes, the beer had gotten quite warm by that time.

After crossing the border of Mauritania (in record time of 1.5 hours) I felt a sudden power loss. We still could do around 90-100 km/h on a flat tarmac road,  but it was impossible to do  the two sandy stages in Mauritania without a healthy engine . We quickly identified the air flow sensor to be faulty, and went to the closest bigger city (70 kilometers away) to find replacement. Unfortunately without success.  Even in the capital there is no MAF sensor for a Nissan Patrol available.

The next idea was to emulate the output signal of the MAF with the help of a potentiometer.  Depending on the speed and acceleration the navigator would have had to turn the knob to emulate a correct signal. But not even a potentiometer was available in the whole town,

Finally, and after asking all the other teams driving Nissan Patrols if they had a spare part, we decided to connect two 1.5V batteries to the engine control unit instead of the MAF sensor. Surprisingly that worked well, we can hardly go above 3000rpm, but below that the engine has almost normal power now.

The biggest disaster happened when I test drove the battery solution, missed how steep one of the dunes was, and crashed the nose of the Patrol into the flat ground when descending from the dune.

It took several hours to straighten the bumper and the front wing, and our wooden cabinet/bed has suffered some damage too. Eventually it seems we can continue the race tomorrow, keep your fingers crossed!