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The biggest gap within a leg of the Rally dos Sertões between the two Volkswagen Race Touareg 2 vehicles was merely 5.01 minutes, and the smallest only one second?

The time difference at ten legs was less than one minute three times? Which proves the thrilling duel within the team.

The fastest stage on the fifth leg was completed by Mark Miller/Ralph Pitchford at an average speed of 153 kph, the slowest on the eighth day by Giniel de Villiers/Dirk von Zitzewitz at 71 kph?

The Volkswagen Race Touareg 2 was lovingly nicknamed “Blue Frog” by the local Brazilian population due to its distinctive external appearance and was the “talk of the town” whenever it was running through the towns of the finishing locations?

The Rally dos Sertões led through six provinces of Brazil? From Goias, the route led through Tocantins, Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte.

The service trucks completed a much longer route through Brazil than the two Race Touareg vehicles? By ship, the mobile garages, including spare parts, landed in São Paulo. From there, they went to the starting location of Goiânia. Via the service route, the trucks covered a distance of approximately 6,000 kilometres to the finish in Natal on the Atlantic coast. 3,000 additional kilometres followed on the return trip to São Paulo. That made the distance of 9,000 kilometres covered by the trucks twice as long as the 4,500 offroad kilometres completed by the Race Touareg cars.

The sentinel system used in cross-country rally racing to warn drivers that quicker vehicles want to overtake was not used in Brazil? Instead, the crews used radios to communicate with each other.

The Volkswagen drivers made use of these communications on some of the legs? The command “Toregi”, however, did not mean “get out of the way” but equates to the transcription of the word Touareg into Portuguese, which was sufficiently prestigious to enable overtaking.

On these occasions the teams being passed often wished the Volkswagen crews good luck for the remainder of the stage?

The Volkswagen drivers praised the roadbook of the Rally dos Sertões for its level of detail?

The roadbooks for all legs comprised 650 pages showing 4,500 pictures with information which the co-driver had to pass on to the driver?

Dirk von Zitzewitz when preparing his roadbook uses eight different colours for marking and spends an average of three hours on the preparation?

Dirk von Zitzewitz and Giniel de Villiers can communicate in German in the cockpit if necessary? Giniel de Villiers' mother tongue is Afrikaans, which is derived from Dutch. Phonetically, “left” and “right” are identical to German in that language.

The Rally dos Sertões was the second longest rally for Volkswagen after the Dakar?

The rally lasted for ten days with tough special stages – without a day of rest? In this intensive form, this was a new experience for the mechanics and drivers.

The routes of the Rally dos Sertões featured about 40 water passages, many of them with a depth of up to one metre. The longest had a length of about 150 metres. For comparison: the “Dakar” merely has water passages in the single-digit range.

The share of 2,714.5 kilometres of special stages of the total distance of 4,511 kilometres equates to 54 percent?