While we’re enjoying the sunshine at Lime Rock, entrants at the Transsyberia Rallye are enduring heavy rains, which are throwing all sorts of deep mud their way. The first text update provided by organizers actually comes from the Canadian team of Kees Neirop and Laurance Yap.

Laurance writes:

Transsyberia, as I learned last year, has an awful little habit of taking you down a notch just when things are feeling really good.

Kees and I had spend the whole week preparing and our car was sorted out exactly the way we wanted; I got a good start on the navigation, entering waypoints into the GPS. We’d both even had a decent night’s sleep.

The police-escorted convoy to and from the start in Red Square was harrowing enough - Moscow drivers are hands-down the world’s craziest - but the run out to the start of the stage was easy enough. As was about the first 20 km of the special stage itself.

All of which changed somewhere around kilometre 26 (of 48) in the roadbook, where the directions stopped making sense and we found ourselves driving around in circles. I would have felt bad for screwing something up, but everyone else was lost too.

A whole train of about 15 cars ended up together at one side of a massive water hole. The lucky ones made it through slowly and steadily; the unlucky ones had to be towed out. And this wasn’t even the BIG water hole that the organizers had warned as about. We spent probably another hour there, being towed through.

During our adventure in the hole - I walked it first and it was waist-deep - we hooked to the car in front of us, but got going under our own power. Which was good, but it also meant we drove over our own tow strap, wrapping it around our wheel and cutting our brake line. Kees is driving it now, to the hotel, using the emergency brake; we’re hoping to have it fixed tonight.

It was carnage on the first day of the rally. We started near the back of the pack, passed a good few cars and finished the stage, but not without some minor damage to the front bumper along with our brake trouble. But we finished better than we started and as I write this, it’s bucketing down rain and 20-plus cars are still stuck halfway into the stage.

All I want right now is some clean clothes, a hot shower and some rest. I don’t even want to think about tomorrow. Yet.

Daily results and video of the pre event tech inspection after the break.
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The 31 teams competing in the 2008 Transsyberia Rallye have just 2 more sleeps before they strap themselves in to their steeds to tackle the 4347 miles leading from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia.

It would be hard to believe that any team could be better prepared than those who are campaigning the specially prepared Porsche Cayenne. In the video after the break, the Porsche team does a bit of final testing of their steeds and competitors like Rod & Ryan Millen and Canadian Kees Nierop discuss what it takes to compete in an event like this.
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It’s hard to believe a year has gone by since the 2007 Transsyberia Rally. Last year, friend of The Garage Laurance Yap and his team mate Kees Nierop didn’t quite make it to the finish. Nope, not quite at all. The video after the break was shot by Kees following the crash while the slice in Laurance’s melon was being attended to by the “ambulance” attendants. Oh yes, there is also the in car footage during the crash. The in car stuff isn’t exactly work safe if you have your speakers cranked. Note the final resting place of the Cayenne’s powerplant. In fact, Laurance tells me that everything that was conceivably usable like rims and tires was stripped from the destroyed machine. It is likely that the shell is still sitting in exactly the same spot of the Gobi desert to this day. That is if it hasn’t been buried in sand.

The intrepid pair are on their way to Moscow as I write this to get ready for the beginning of the 2008 event, seeking an entirely more positive outcome. If all goes as planned, we should have daily text updates from the rally and maybe even daily video.
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I really need to delve into the Flickr pool more often to liven things up here in The Garage, so I can offer a bit more variety. The problem is that there are so many great images, and yet I continually go back to the work of Flickr user Nigel Smuckatelli.

His real name is Louis Galanos and he spent some time toting a lens around Sebring and Daytona back in the golden years. It’s fortunate for us that Louis took the time, because his work is just incredible.

The car above is the Porsche 917k campaiged by the Martini & Rossi team for Helmut Marko and Rudi Lins in the 1971 24 hours of Daytona. The car did not finish.

Be sure to visit The Garage on Flickr, where there are just too many great photos to show here.

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What could be better on a Sunday afternoon that a bit of Porsche related video. Garage419’s Matt Farah combines the visuals of pretty girls and Porsches with a backdrop soundtrack of flat sixes at speed. Somehow along the way the 993 is compared to Farah’s moobs and we learn what car is best for Road Head.

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The participants of the 2008 running of the Transsyberia Rallye who will be driving specially prepared Porsche Cayennes have descended upon Leipzig, Germany to prepare for the rally that runs from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar in July. Included in the teams are friend of The Garage, Laurance Yap who is posing above with the machine he will share with fellow Canadian Kees Nierop.

During this session, teams will learn the ins and outs of their Cayenne S Transsyberia and the navigation equipment. Basic maintenance and repairs are performed en-route by the driving team, while more major repairs are looked after by a team of Porsche technicians that follow the event. Teams are instructed by last year’s winner Rod Millen and pro co-driver Andi Schulz, not only in use of equipment but also with tips regarding things such as reading the terrain, vehicle extraction and how to control the vehicle at high speeds on loose surfaces. Teams with prior experience work with new teams to ease the path.
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There have just been so many submissions to The Garage’s Flickr pool over the past week that I don’t know where to begin. There are photos from all sorts of genre, from motorsports to rust & from old to new.

I’ve chosen this shot of the Porsche 917 that Pedro Rodriguez and Jackie Oliver drove to victory at Daytona, taken by Nigel Smuckatelli. The cool thing about Nigel’s work is that he worked as a safety official at Daytona and Sebring in the late 60’s and early 70’s and took his camera along for the ride. Some of the pit and track images in Nigel’s photo stream are just incredible. Revson, Mcqueen, Andretti, Gregg are just a few of the drivers he has candid footage of.

Of special note to us here in The Garage are some shots of a Corvette that I believe a young Gary Faules may have crewed for.

There will be bonus points for the reader who can tell me which car in Nigel’s photos was piloted by a bunch of Ontarians, one of whom was the inventor of the serpentine belt!

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Porsche and camera lens manufacturer, Sigma, have teamed up for a really cool contest. Every Supercup race weekend, Sigma will give away 1 300mm F2.8 APO EX DG HSM lens worth around 3,000 Euro. The prize will go to the FIA accredited shooter who grabs the most unusual shot of the weekend. At the end of the season, the photog whose image is chosen as Photo of the Year will win a 200-500mm F2.8 APO EX DG. While the contest isn’t open to the amateurs, there will undoubtedly be lots of sweet eye candy for the rest of us!

Press release after the break
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When we started planning The Garage a few years back, I envisioned a sort of virtual garage where all manner of car enthusiasts would feel comfortable dropping by and sharing a story or two. As The Garage has grown, we’ve been lucky enough to be joined by young enthusiasts and old racers. Time worn journos and new guys trying to make a name for themselves have dropped by with a few tales. Each one has helped shape The Garage and added a bit more flavour. Today, we have yet another talent coming dropping in for a visit. Thanks to Gary Faules, I am more than honoured to welcome C. Van Tune to The Garage.

Who is C. Van Tune? I’ll let Van make the introduction himself:
If you’ve been a car enthusiast for any of the past 28 years, you probably know the name C. Van Tune. Maybe you’ve read some of the two thousand articles he’s written. Or seen any of his hundreds of TV news appearances. Or, maybe he’s best known as the Editor-in-Chief of Motor Trend Magazine from 1994-2001. He surprised everyone when he stepped down from MT’s helm, but very soon after he accepted the job as host of ESPN’s first automotive TV series “Drive”, and quickly set about doing his trademark sideways-driving, smoking-tire road tests for the sports world—a winning formula that continues today. A self-described victim of “Mad Car Disease” Van owns more than 15 cars, most of which are 1950s and ‘60s American classics. His love of motor-sports has put him behind the wheel in professional road racing, drag racing, hill climbs, autocrosses, off road racing, vintage racing and celebrity racing. Always a down-to-earth person who enjoys talking cars with anyone, Van can be counted on to leave the scene amid a giant cloud of tire smoke…and to hell with the hydrocarbons!

Van has hung up the keyboard for now, but has graciously allowed us to post some his Drive segments. While the products in these vids may be a few years old, those of us who live outside the reach of ESPN will have an opportunity to see some classic footage.

Over the coming weeks, we’re going to share as many of these Drive episodes as we can. After the break, watch as Van gets some seat time in a Porsche Carrera GT.
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In today’s world, there aren’t too many manufacturers who see the value in building true race ready versions of their road cars. True, Dodge keeps on track with toys like the Challenger Super Stock and Ford has it’s FR500S, but there aren’t too many others. Beyond Porsche that is.

Porsche’s reputation has had a rock solid base in racing throughout the company’s history. There has almost always been full on race cars from the Porsche stable that are based on production cars and are available to the sporting consumer.

The latest in this line is the newest 911 variant: the GT3 Cup S. Based on the road going GT3 RS, the Cup S is a 3.6 liter, 440 horsepower race only car. If you have a spare 250,000 Euros lying around, you too can enter the Super Cup or Carrera Cup.

Complete press release and photos after the break
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