You know (Stephen Watson), I bought (and brought) a Surefire flash light for the trip with extra batteries..  Cleaned and brought spare AAAs for my LED headlamp, and Volkswagen even gave us LED head lamps. I also took along my Leatherman and a folding knife.  I just left all that stuff iin the hotel room cause I thought tech inspection would be like Baja.  This scrutineering is more like signingup for college courses, and then going out to take your driving test. The French officials can be brutal, and the Germans have little love for them.

-At Scrutineering-

As the driver of record I had to take our log book inside a large tent (with finished hardwood floors I might add) and go around from station to station collecting things from people that spoke French and some English.  

About 100 people were in this tent collecting their rally trackers, GPS, a system they call Sentinel, and a toll both transponder- among other things.

 We would have had to get a satelite phone too, but in VW's case, our Touaregs have them so we just had to prove it.

If I had any idea that's how it was going to go today, I would have also brought my backpack just to carry all the stuff.

After we collected all the literature, electronics, and stamps for our log book, we then went outside and had to wait for the French AS0 (basically the Dakar version of SCORE) to install and test our rally tracker and GPS.

Now keep in mind, there are 14 service Touaregs here at Dakar (there are 5 more in reserve just in case) so VW has built mounts into the dash and run all the wires for the rally tracker and GPS.  So all the ASO has to do is plug them in and test them.

When they plugged our rally tracker in (VW built a mount for it on the roll cage) they fed it power and it worked,  but I still had to run and get that 42 euro cable to make it sink up with the antena that VW had already wounted to the roof.

Then the GPS system went in and was inspected by another official.  The system worked fine, but the backup battery pack wasn't working.  It needed to be replaced, and then when it was, the officials complained that the GPS antena wire wasn't staying plugged in.  Keep in mind we just picked the GPS up from the ASO because you have to use its spec-GPS and can't just bring your own.

Did I mention that it was pouring rain this whole time? And we were outside....

The lead guy for all the service vehicles (Vans, Touaregs, and Man trucks) was having fits.  He's a very sharp guy  and speaks very good American.

We went out for dinner after we got all the vehicles through, and are back at the hotel now.  It's 11:30pm here but I'll upload my photos I took and resize them and send them out to you in a couple hours.


David