MINI All 4 Racing end Day 3 of the Silk Way Rally with four out of the five crews in the top ten positions.
With the rain abating, it had caused the route tracks to flood. However, there was the chance of storms which meant support helicopters had to stay grounded, which meant Leg Two was cancelled by the organisers.
Leg Three saw the cars go through some fast driving across gravel tracks, which opened up the door for Yazeed Al Rajhi and Timo Gottschalk to complete the stage as the lead MINI All4 Racing crew in second, behind Team Peugeot-Total’s Stéphane Peterhansel.
Vladimir Vasilyev and Konstantin Zhiltsov pushed hard, but safely secured fourth place after Leg Three. Aidyn Rakhimbayev and Anton Nikolaev were in sixth place and are in the same position overall after the leg. Britain’s Harry Hunt had a torrid day as he was the last of the top ten MINI All4 Racing crews to finish in ninth place.
Al Rajhi said after Leg Three “For me everything was ok. After 20k, we caught another car and unfortunately we had to follow in his dust for quite a long distance. It was a nice stage and we had a chance to make a better time, but second is a good place to start tomorrow. I have a very good co-driver and he made the stage very easy for us.”
Hunt added “It was quite a hard stage for us, I didn’t find it very easy at all. There were a lot of tracks through the grass so it was quite hard to see ahead and then we hit a water splash. Then we got lost a little bit. And then again. But we are here and looking forward to tomorrow.”
