Amsterdam to Prague

Day 1, and quite a day it has been :)

We started at the Bar Odessa in Amsterdam (near Panama, for the Amsterdam people) in a 'Le Mans' fashion, meaning all teams started from a line and had to run to their respective cars.

The start was somewhat chaotic (and fun); Pirates almost managed to knock someone into the water with our car, but we were third out of the blocks.

Some traffic violations later (it was almost zero traffic in Amsterdam, so we could exit with tires screaming) we were on our way to Germany.

After a few minutes, Pirates was part of a three-team lead group and we lost sight of all teams behind us.

The group, consisting of team Spoetnik, team Boekhoudboys and team Pirates of the Ukraine stuck together until around Barneveld, when team Spoetnik (driving a Lexus LS as well) suddenly departed and took an alternative route.

We managed to stay hot on the tail of the Boekhoudboys (well, it was not too much of an effort...) until somewhere deep in Germany, where roadworks forced us to let them go.
Their lithe Saab 9003 was much smaller than our chunky LS and we just could not press past some of the trucks.

We thought we lost them and we drove our own race. We had an excellent pitstop and a changing of driver.

The rest of Germany was done in an expeditious fashion; we managed to gain a lot of time, and we even found the Boekhoudboys again.

After we had waved them goodbye, we left them in our wake.

100 km from the finish we were in a solid lead and we had good fluid traffic, but then we were directed by TomTom to go through some very small towns and places with lots of traffic lights.

Our speed was decimated to almost zero.

Coming up on Prague we decided to be very very nice and not to break any rules (well, not any rules that the locals did not break; we simply followed the fastest local, which wasn't a very fast local at all).

We almost immediately found the finish, and we found that we were third!!!

What happened? Well, the Boekhoudboys had changed TomTom maps from Germany-Poland-Chechnia etc. to the TomTom maps of Eastern Europe. They were not directed through the small towns...
So they had beaten us by 41 minutes!
The team that came second was only ahead of us by 2 minutes, and they had used the same maps as the Boekhoudboys.

Hadn't we been so polite we would have been second, and had we switched to the Eastern Europe maps we would have been first by a really solid margin.

But we have not, so we are not. No use crying over spillt milk.

There is still three days to go...