Marshall Clarke secured his second fourth place finish in a week as he finished just outside the podium positions on the Kuwait National Rally. Co-driving for Qatari driver Abdulaziz Al Kuwari the pair tackled the desert event fresh from finishing fourth in WRC2 at Rally Mexico the previous week, and repeated the feat on the first round of the Middle East Rally Championship.

The desert stages of Rally Kuwait presented a very different challenge to the traditional rally stages in Europe, and despite all of Marshall’s rally experience throughout the world he admits the desert stages presented a unique challenge.

“Desert rallying is completely different,” admitted Marshall. “It’s like doing a rally in a field. There are no land marks. In a rally you come down a stage and you know exactly where you are and what is coming up on the notes, but in the desert it makes no sense. It’s really, really strange. There are places where there is maybe a mound of sand and you have to go round it but its unbelievable how it plays tricks with your eyes. Everything is the one colour. It’s crazy. I have done an awful lot of rallies and that is the first time I was in the desert, and its hats off to these boys. They don’t slow down or anything though. That’s definitely not an option for them! It was a new challenge for me, and I’m a lot wiser than I was last Thursday when I started.” It was an incident packed event for Marshall. They suffered five punctures during the course of the event and also incurred a one minute penalty for deviating off the course and taking an inadvertent short cut on the sandy barren surface on their way to fourth.

“The punctures put paid to our chances,” he admitted. “We had five punctures and one complete delamination. If you hit sand banks sideways and you have too low a pressure in your tyres you can get punctures. You need to have the pressure low enough to float across the top of the sand, but it needs to be high enough that if you start to drift sideways the sand doesn’t get between the bead and the rim. Then we got a minute penalty for deviating from the course on the GPS tracker. We just couldn’t find the bit of sand, and the tracker showed we had taken a short cut. The guy in third place got the same minute penalty as we did. He got 8 punctures and we got five, but he got away with it and we didn’t.” Marshall next outing is a return to the World Rally Championship for Rally Argentina, before he travels to rallies in Iran, Portugal and Sardinia.