Africa Eco Race 2017: Stage Seven - Mutual Help and Team Spirit

For the first time since the start of the Africa Eco Race, KAMAZ-master members failed to take top two positions at the end of the stage.

Stage Seven Tiwilit - Tiwilit. Stage length is 440 km, special section length is 414 km.

The participants of the Africa Eco Race 2017 continue to conquer the sands of Mauritania. Yesterday they broke the loop stage of the rally-marathon which was more than 400 km long.

"Today there were really those long-awaited Mauritanian sands. They are unusual. Unusual in that they are not dunes (the highest dune was roughly as high as a half of KAMAZ), but a sandy road on which the truck gets stuck, does not go, what the organizers had warned about," said Andrey Karginov. "Also, today Sergey Kupriyanov's crew got stuck, we stopped and helped the boys and went on to finish of the sandbox together, as planned," added the racer.

Sergey Kupriyanov, pilot of the second KAMAZ-master crew at the Africa Eco Race also found the current stage not easy. "There was a standstill in the sand. We got off the well-trodden track onto a flat plot. And if you make a little shift to the side in Mauritania, the consistency of sand immediately changes, and you just get stuck in it. Well, we'll keep it in mind tomorrow," Kupriyanov explained the problems of his crew at the seventh stage.

Alas, problems with viscous Mauritanian sands entailing misadventures for ther gas powered KAMAZ do not end here. 15 km before the finish, the racers had to change the wheel. "We have lost about 25 minutes because of standstill, then we won about five minutes over Valtr, as our timing by passing the CP shows, but then we punched the wheel 150 km before the finish. At first, air inflating helped, but then it failed to work well 15 km before the finish. It was impossible to run further. I had to change the wheel losing 11 minutes more," complained Kupriyanov.

Andrey Karginov's failure at this stage deprived his crew of their leadership positions in the overall standings: at the end of the seventh stage, he went by three positions down to fifth place, however, leading in the "trucks" classification and winning half an hour over Valtr breathing down his neck.

Today, the team will leave the bivouac near the town of Tiwilit, where they have spent the last two days. They will travel to the settlement of Amodjar. The length of the eighth stage is 454 km, the length of the special stage is 425 km.

Stage 7 T4 Scratch Standings