Looper

Thank you @Alex M (Alex Space M) Correct @AlexM (is Alex without Space M) Sorry for the confusion. 😝 @Yury you are back on waitlist again for the third time. I would recommend you to join Newbie drives for now. You are not eligible to join this drive. Please understand. This time I will not remove you from the drive and ask you to leave.

@Sviatoslav, @Mahmut, @RiadJL, @nithish468, @Glenn W, @Hani crest king, @Marek, @AlexM (updated) @Ranjan Das, @M.Seidam Thank you all for joining the drive. The meeting time is 10:00 am in the morning. It takes approximately 3 hours to reach to the meeting point from Dubai, so one can start at 7:00 am in the morning so as to reach the meeting point on time. I would however recommend that you start at 6:30 am in the morning, to take into account stoppages and for fueling up etc. However, don't be late, because I am notorious for leaving people behind who do not arrive on time: @Mahesh_ can vouch for it from his firsthand experience. Drive should end at around 4:00 pm in the afternoon, after 6 hours of driving. The drive however should be uneventful and easy, I would want us to enjoy the landscape than to do anything else in that place. We will drive for approximately 120 km in the desert and there would not be any easy tracks to get out. As we will reach end of drive just before the sunset after a long day, I will stop at a place where camping for the night can be done, and it is a good option. I am assuming that everyone is going to start in the morning to reach to the meeting point, that means you would have driven for around 10 hours already by the time we ended the drive. I will highly recommend all take rest for a few hours at least before moving out - take a nap if you can. Camping is a good option if you wish, rest for the night and move out in the morning fresh. I am going to put a poll do vote on it.

@Yury this is a drive for Fewbie and above. Looks like you are yet to do any drives with Carnity and that makes you a Newbie. You are not eligible to participate in the drive. I would remove you from the drive. You need to do a few Newbie drives and then apply for promotion for Fewbie and so on.

Congratulations @khlief. Hope Fewbie plus is going to be fun level for you.

Congratulations @Glenn W. enjoy this lev. It is normally going to be fast paced.

Congratulations @Mahmut. Many happy drives lie ahead in this level.

Congratulations @Waqaɾ. Enjoy your new level. See you more in this level.

Congratulations @Ishak a lot more responsibilities lie ahead.

Congratulations @J-P L in your promotion, certainly a deserving level upgrade.

Congratulations @nithish468 on this penultimate lever of driving. You will certainly enjoy this level.

Congratulations @Ben Lee on your promotion to Fewbie Plus. Enjoy your new level.

Agree to the wet sand issue on Saturday’s drive. While I was running, or rather flying through the dunes. I can understand the issues faced by back of the convoy. When sand is dry, even if the track is churned it allows for the sand to move a bit and make it easier to drive. But wet sand makes hard tracks that don’t budge and make it more challenging to drive. On Sunday it was fairly dried up.

As much as it looks nice to blast sand around, you should not be doing it. In the best-case scenario, you have a pop-out, but it is also the leading cause for rollovers, as sand creates a wall underneath the tires and flips the vehicle. You should be very careful with fish tailing and under no circumstances fight gravity. The true skill of desert driver is in driving with the least amount of disturbance on the top layer of sand. I would advise on caution in what you do because you travel with guests including children.

Drive Report While in most respects both the drives were similar, there are some key differences. First section was done in an overall narrower area on Saturday, but it was a tad bit more fluid. On Sunday I was trying to do it different and wandered around a more. We covered more distance on Sunday in first section than on Saturday, but it was also ever so slightly rough on the edges compared to Saturday; May be because finally I was feeling the bumps of the track we left behind on the previous day. Second section was done on a more challenging track on Saturday, resulting in more refusals and consumed more time. I toned it down on Sunday to reach the next section earlier, and also because we had to take a detour to the pillion track and back. I like the way we did it on Saturday obviously it was more of an adrenaline rush. The third section was the best area to play. We spent a short duration there on Saturday and moved on because we were already late, and we suffered refusal that took the time allotted to play in that area. On Suday we had a flawless drive in this part of the desert. As a seasoned off-roader, who has seen more greenery in the desert than sand lately, I cannot even try to describe how happy I felt here. I could have spent the whole 3 hours here and not do anything else. Even the exit was smoother where we exited. I think it was done better on Sunday. We just about entered the Fourth section on Saturday but it was late already so we did a bumpy exit to the pillion track. I hope you all enjoyed the drive. I would like to thank @Frederic and @M.Seidam to be in the drive, you guys always there to help out on the refusals and it was confidence boosting to have spare leads in the drive (due to recent issues with my car though it is good now). Also big thanks to @Anoop Nair and @Bjoern for being excellent second leads. Till next time... PS: A note on speed: While the average speed of the Sunday drive is much more 19.1 kph compared to 12.9 kph on Saturday, we can see that the difference in moving speed was lot narrower. It was 20.6 kph on Saturday and 21.9 kph on Sunday. A point to note that we had more pillion track to cover on Sunday compared to Saturday that would have favorably affected the Sunday. We were also doing a bit more difficult areas in Section 2 on Saturday. So, on Saturday, we moved less but when we did, we moved with as much vigor as we did on Sunday.

Apologies, didn’t see this message. Unfortunately it was quite late as the convoy had already started to leave.