Silk Way Rally 2017 – Leg 10 – Hami - Dunhuang

Media Information

Silk Way Rally 2017

18 July 2017

Silk Way Rally 2017 – Leg 10 – Hami - Dunhuang

• Both MINI John Cooper Works Rally cars (#101 & 105) finish Leg 10 in top three
• Yazeed Al Rajhi / Tom Colsoul cross the finish line in second
• Third place finish for Bryce Menzies / Peter Mortensen to return to top three overall

Munich. Yazeed Al Rajhi (KSA) and co-driver Tom Colsoul (BEL) enjoyed an excellent day in the #101 MINI John Cooper Works Rally today, completing stage 10 of the 2017 Silk Way Rally in second place. The competitors tackled 517.53km of fast, technical tracks today, with Al Rajhi and Colsoul finishing the special distance of 360.28km in a time of 03:25:10 – just 46 seconds behind the stage winner.

The pair are now in 11^th place overall and within reaching distance of a top 10 finish, with less than four minutes separating them from 10^th position.

Al Rahji: “Everything was ok today, we had a small issue with the power steering but it was all ok in the end. Then around the middle of the special stage we got stuck in the dust of another vehicle for about 40km, but everything was fine.”

Not far behind Al Rajhi was the second MINI John Cooper Works Rally (#105) of Bryce Menzies (USA) and Peter Mortensen (USA). The American duo finished the stage in third position, just two minutes and 18 seconds behind their fellow MINI competitors. Their times on today’s stage has placed Menzies and Mortensen back inside the top three overall with less than four minutes gap to second place.

Menzies: “Today was really good; at the beginning it was tight, technical and pretty rough and dusty so we got stuck behind two trucks. It took us a while to get past them but once we did, it opened up and it was really high speed roads so we had clean air for a long time. We made up quite a bit of time and then at the end – about 90km from the finish – we caught another truck, which made it really dusty and it was hard to see in front of us. All-in-all it was a good stage, a really high speed stage and no problems. The car ran great and we got third so a good starting position for tomorrow.”

Tomorrow’s Leg 11 of the 2017 Silk Way Rally takes the competitors from Dunhuang to Jiayuguan across 783.84km, of which 488.65km are special stages. It will be only the second time in the rally where two special stages are run in the same day.

Silk Way Rally 2017: Ranking after Leg 10