In the Astrakhan region the second stage of the championship of Russia on rally raids - 'Gold of Kagan-2015' came to the end.
'KAMAZ master' crews won the five first places in overall classification of competitions. Dmitry Sotnikov's crew became the winner of the race in overall and trucks category, on the second, third, fourth and fifth places are Ayrat Mardeev's, Anton Shibalov's, Sergey Kupriyanov's and Andrey Karginov's crews respectively. One more crew of KAMAZ representative Eduard Nikolaev due to serious transmission breakage at the previous stage following the results of four days of competitions took the seventh place.
The final stage of competitions passed in desert territories around borders of Kalmykia and the Astrakhan region and approximately repeated a route of the second stage. In particular, athletes should overcome Africa and the Big brother barkhans. Sand dried out after rains became friable and difficult for the movement.
"On the Big brother dune we pleased public – got stuck, - Sergey Kupriyanov told on the finish, - couldn't drive on a crest on the first try, stopped literally in a meter from a landmark – but as a result after all drove, without leaving the truck and without going down. There were some moments when reference points were almost not visible, we a little bit roamed: there was continuous sand, we could see nothing. We overtook Andrey Karginov before service – it seemed after that he came back to service. The route dried up and became more high-speed".
Andrey Karginov really had to use help of assistance team in a special service point along a route: the lethal route and high speed became the reason that shock-absorbers of the right forward wheel of his truck were torn off, steering was damaged.
Commenting on it, the head of team Vladimir Chagin told that actually any of crews on today's 245 kilometers of the route had more than one thousand chances to meet the obstacle similar to that Andrey's crew got on the way, simply today he was less lucky, than others.
Route complexity is proved out by the fact that from 42 participants registered on start, in final heat participated 29.
Vladimir Chagin remained pleased with team performance on the race and speeds demonstrated by crews. Sergey Kupriyanov's crew Significant shows increase in skill which after successful January performance on 'Africa Eco Race' continues to promote 'gas engine' topic, driving on KAMAZ truck equipped with mixture of diesel fuel and methane engine.