I was very lucky to be asked by Porsche Cars GB to drive the Porsche Cayenne Transyberia on The Transyberia Rally in 2007. During this event I rubbed shoulders with such people as Rene Metge who won The Paris Dakar in a Porsche 959 and Armin Schwartz a famous German Rally Champion.

The race was run from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar a distance of 4000 miles in 13 days. On each day there was a special stage of between 13km to 400km, depending on the terrain that had to be crossed and this picture is from Stage 3 that was held deep in the Russian forests near the city of Omsk: it was a tough stage of 15km.

The route from the hotel in the centre of Omsk to the start of the special stage was interesting, as part of it crossed a narrow rickety bridge, where quite a number of the competitors baulked at the thought of crossing. I remember that after a bit of teamwork from the confident teams all the cars crossed successfully and were soon parked up near the start of Stage 3 to wait for the organisers to be ready and open the stage.

I was looking forward very much to this stage, as it was rumoured to be a tough one, crossing forest and soft ground, right up my street!!, especially as at this stage we were running in 5th place.

After an hour or so there had been no movement at all and Richard (my co-driver) and I had parked up with the Australian Team of Paul Watson and David Morley enjoying a drink and a chat. After a while we decided to walk up to the front and see what was happening. As we approached there seemed to be a heated argument between the organisers and a few competitors. Closer to the argument we heard “It’s too tough” and “it’s impossible”, It seemed that a lot of teams had reservations as to the possibility of getting even a few yards into this stage, much to the disgust of The Russian’s from the local off road club, who had been responsible for setting up this challenge.

The organisers of the Transyberia Rally called a meeting soon afterwards, explaining that the stage was too difficult and would result in much damage so it would have to be cancelled. I was very disappointed as my chance to get to the front had disappeared.

Both Paul and I felt a little annoyed about this outcome and as we walked back to our Porsche’s one of the organisers who knew of my experience, caught us up and asked if I would go a little way into the stage, so that the film crew and photographers could take a few pictures. Of course I agreed immediately and Paul offered to come with us a little way. Secretly I was determined to complete the stage to prove the others wrong.

Ten minutes later we were in the stage, enjoying challenging slippery climbs, deep water filled pools and v-gulleys set to trap the inexperienced. The stage took us deep into the forest and sometimes the gaps between the trees were only just wide enough to fit our car through. By twenty minutes the others had left us with only the Russian Off Road Club members as company, who had, initially a very dim view of the ability of our Porsche.

The route became ever more challenging as we came close to a lake, with the winch coming to the fore every so often and towards the end the track the “pièce de résistance” was a large concrete pipe running across the track and this was indeed an interesting challenge.

Each stage had a time limit and if you took longer penalties were added. We took 35mins and the stage time was 45mins so I was very happy and the Russians were very impressed. When we eventually after a further 4 hours of liaison driving found ourselves at the hotel for the night our Cayenne Transyberia was the only one covered from top to toe in mud. The other crews were amazed that we had completed the stage and I did cause a bit of embarrassment for the organisers.