The crew of the Thomas Flyer that won the New York to Paris intercontinental rally in 1908 was forced to run along railway tracks through Siberia because the muddy roads were impassable. A hundred years later, apparently not much has changed.

An Australian crew comprising David Morley and Paul Watson are running a Porsche Cayenne in this year's Transsyberia Rallye (more here), an annual event traversing the some of the least hospitable parts of Eurasia. This year's event set out from Moscow on July 11.

Morley, a regular MOTOR contributor, is keeping a blog of the event as he and co-driver Paul Watson work their way up through the field. The blog here begins from Day Four of the event:

Monday July 14 -- Stage 4
Ekaterienberg -- Tjumen, 483 kms

It took a while to get the results from yesterday's stage as we had to wait for the officials to empty their trousers following the emergency landing of their chopper.

A good day for Team Oz then; we finished in the top half of the field (17th place) and were very competitive -- even managing to finish ahead of a bunch of rally-raid professionals. Not bad for a long haired lout (Morley) and a bloke who spends most of his time behind a desk in a Porsche office (Watson).

Our car is straight (relatively...) and we are in good spirits, although nerve endings are slightly shot because of the Russian Roulette (sorry, and yes pun is intended) with the local traffic.

So Monday dawns... Well actually it doesn't dawn.  It's bucketing rain again and you can't see the grey clouds for the curtains of water draping the landscape.

We get ourselves in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles frame of mind and battle the traffic, water spray and bad light to get to the start... with five minutes to spare, busting every road rule along the way. Ooh, if we drove like this in Australia we'd be locked up and the key thrown away.

And it was all for naught! The organizers had cancelled the special stage. And rightly so. The weather was lousy and so much rain had fallen that we would have needed a boat and not a 4WD to complete the test.

Making our way to the next overnight stop we started to notice a slight vibration in the car which was getting worse. Because of all the caked-on mud we'd snorted over the preceding days we figured it may be the cooling fan vibrating. We eventually found a car wash of sorts, and a pressure hose, and set about de-caking the radiators and fans. It appears that the layer of mud we coated the fans with had caused the vibration. With vibration gone our only other concern was engine temperature as there was so much mud embedded in the radiators not even a pressure hose was going to get rid of it all.

Classification: 24th place

Tuesday July 15 -- Stage 5
Tjumen -- Omsk, 672 kms

Our first nice sunny day with blue skies and sunshine and a balmy although not-quite-Chernobyl-like temperature in the mid 30s.

From mud and slush and sheets of rain we now had dust, plains and open fields.  The grasslands were incredibly high, at some points as much as one metre high, which meant you could only see the track for 10 or so metres ahead. When the plains did open up local obstacles came into play -- namely Russian farmers on tractors, oblivious to our presence.

The track was also extremely dusty so we started out nice and conservatively (the plan remember, is to Finish the Unfinished Business).

But even at a conservative pace we soon caught up to another Cayenne but we couldn't pass the car because the dust was so thick. Without fear of exaggeration, at times visibility was less than one metre. It was brown soup.  We may not have hairy chests, but we're tough like blokes with hairy chests, but not so tough that we didn't share glances that silently said: "Uh, oh, we could hit something here and not see it until it's too late." We were driving blind. Now that we think about it -- it was silly, dangerous and bloody terrifying.  The first thing you learn even before you learn how to walk is not to drive blind in the dust.

So we eased up in places, even came to a complete stop so we could reassess if we were traveling North, South, East or West. Navigation was simply not possible. Needless to say we missed a turn and it took us five minutes to realise and turn back, only to catch up to two Cayennes we had already passed and would now need to pass again. Grrrrr.

But if we think we had it bad, then spare a thought for the British crew and their Cayenne. In the distance -- when we could actually see through the dust -- we spotted smoke a few kilometers ahead. As we got closer we realised it was the Cayenne of the British team -- Martin Rowe and Richard Tuthill -- standing next to a fully-engulfed Porsche that would soon melt to the ground.

Speaking of heat... our gauges were showing engine temp north of 120 degrees from the partially blocked radiators, so we were forced to slow and drive at a pace that would save the car.

With the dust, missing a turn-off and then slowing down we thought we'd had a bummer of a stage -- only to discover with some delight that we finished 13th quickest out of the 29 cars that completed the stage.

This moved us up to P22, but still some six hours behind the Swiss crew in P21. If we had not copped the 10 hour time penalty on Day 1, we would be in position 14 and fighting for a top 10 slot.  Insert crow call here!!!

Wednesday July 16 -- Stage 6
Omsk -- Novosibirsk, 712 kms

"Four-Three-Two... STOP!"

That's what happened as we were revving the guts out of our Cayenne waiting to be flagged away for the start of the sixth special stage when one of the officials jumped in front of our Cayenne and frantically waved his arms telling us not to proceed.

There had been a crash during the stage and paramedics were needed to attend to the crew. The Italian team, as it turned out, had taken a hard landing off a jump and their driver, Antonio Tognana, had suffered a severe back injury.

Cue the theme from the "Twilight Zone".

Signor Tognana -- as we later discovered -- had suffered a compression fracture of the T12 vertebrae, the precise injury Watson copped in last year's raid after taking a mother of a landing when the road fell out from underneath him.

Ninety minutes passed before we were flagged off and again the stage was dusty and where there was tall grass it was very T-A-L-L, in places it was roof high against the Cayenne. You've seen those films where the crazy guy drives his car through a corn field mowing down the crops and making his own tracks in the process... ditto Team Oz on this stage.

We know the real test, and real opportunity to claw back time is in Mongolia, where the stages are longer and our experience from last year hopefully brings an advantage.  With daylight between our position and those directly above us, the only good news about the Italians crashing is that we move up a spot on the leader board.

Today we were solid if unspectacular and finished 18th... but we're still just outside the Top 20 in the overall standings.

Tomorrow's stage has been cancelled as the medical crew has to accompany the Italians to the airport for a flight back to their home country where Signor Tognana can get some decent medical help.

So our next competitive stage will not be until Sunday as Friday we cross our fingers and try to get across the Russian border into Mongolia, and Saturday is the "official" rest day. So it will be Sunday before we put on the Angry Faces again and go Mental in Mongolia.

At present, the Team Oz -- Unfinished Business Cayenne is in 20th position on the road. Readers can keep up to date with the results by clicking here.

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