Transsyberia Rally: Laurance Yap leg two summary

Day 2 -- Vladimir to Kazan

Well, it's one thing to have a mechanical failure that means you can't finish a special stage. It's a whole other thing for the mechanical failure - in this case, the transmission - give out one kilometer before the end of the stage, after having a really good run.

We've had two really good days and two really poor finishes.

Today's stage was mostly through sand and mud, and we didn't get stuck once (I didn't have to step out of the car) and we made no navigational errors either. We passed a couple of cars and would probably have finished sixth, after starting fifteenth. By our estimate, the Team Canada Cayenne S TransSyberia was running 5th when we had our problem.

The friendly Porsche mechanics, who have been running the stages as support, gave us a tow to the hotel and now the unstoppable Juergen Kern is trying to locate us a transmission, hopefully to be installed in Yekaterinburg on Monday. If that can happen, we'll play catch-up and rejoin the rally before we cross the border to Mongolia.

As for Ryan and Colin in the Team U.S. entry, they were thrilled to make it through the leg. They too had a failure -- a power steering pump, right as they pulled up to the start line. Ryan just gritted his teeth and strong-armed it through. He said it had helped that they were one of the last ones on the stage and despite the loss of the pump, they only lost 7 minutes.

At the end of the day, Ryan had finished the stage 10th place and 13th place overall, up from 17th after the first day. The leaders are still the Portuguese Team.

-credit: kgpr.com