Dakar sans duneage

Those of us who are dyed-in-the-wool fans of Dakar (and who felt truly gutted by the cancellation of this year's event) have something to cling to, as right now the Central European Rally is in full swing. Imagine all the usual Dakar cast members throwing their multi-million dollar toys around forests in Romania and Hungary for seven whole days and you'll get the idea.

I've been remiss in talking about this event, simply because a) I forgot about it; and b) they (the organizers) didn't seem to do very much to make sure that racing nuts like me don't forget about it.

All is not lost! I have gotten my hands on the Eurosport coverage of the first four stages and plan on writing about it as soon I've watched them all.

Just to whet your appetite, I've seen two photos, one of a VW Touraeg race vehicle about 15 feet in the air coming off a jump and the other of a Mitsubishi Pajero and another Touraeg duelling side by side on a stage. This bodes rather well, even if an inspection of the route maps indicates a lot of liaison for very little actual racing.

Dakar is not dead

The ASO, organizers of the Dakar Rally, are certainly up against it. Although the event is terrific and well-loved by the motorsport community, mainstream media tends to focus on the more negative aspects of the rally, including competitor deaths, civilian injuries and deaths, kidnappings and terrorist threats.

This year it all proved too much after alleged Al Qaeda operatives threatened the race directly. Whether there was any substance to the threats was deemed irrelevent by organizers who felt they had no choice but to cancel the whole thing.

Should a similar threat occur next year, we can only imagine the outcome will be the same. So what next for the Dakar Rally? Surely it's too big a risk to run the race through these areas of unrest?

Many have suggested an alternative part of the world for the rally, Patagonia being one suggestion and the Asian steppes another. It's hard to say if the event would retain the same spirit if it moved out of Africa. Most people would agree that the real character of the event emerges in the middle of the event with a series of marathon stages crossing thousands of miles of dunes. A rally raid without this iconic group of stages would surely never feel like a "real" Dakar. After all, the last time the race deviated from its basic Morocco-Senegal path was when it crossed the top of north Africa and ended in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt, and the plentiful dune stages helped the event retain its character, despite a vastly different final few days.

Perhaps a raid that includes the heavily-duned Gobi or Taklamakan Deserts in China might be the answer? Dunes are also very prevalent in the Arabian Desert which is the second-largest non-polar desert in the world.

For me, however, the issue needs to be addressed from the perspective of finding the best way to continue to run the event in Africa. If we assume that for now Algeria and Mauritania are off-limits, many other options exist. The event has run through Libya in the past, so it should be feasible to start in Europe, spend a day on a boat to Tunisia, then run through Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Mali and into Senegal. Those last three listed countries are all moderate, reasonably stable states and offer plenty of terrain that is so synonymous with the Dakar Rally.

Another option that comes to mind is doing it in southern Africa, taking in the dune areas of Namibia, after travelling through Zambia and Tanzania before ending in Cape Town.

Whatever the ASO comes up with I hope that the Dakar Rally is able to continue and do so without losing the character and challenge that makes it such an important and special race.

What happens when you crash out of Dakar

Now that I'm a card-carrying dirtbike / dual-sport owner, it's only right that I frequent the massivley busy ADVRider.net forums.

I came across an interesting thread that details the experiences of one forum member who took part in this year's Dakar Rally. It pretty much confirmed what I already knew: when things are going right, Dakar is a challenging test of skill and endurance; when things go wrong, it becomes a mental trial of epic proportions. After watching Charley Boorman's "Race to Dakar" documentary, in which his cameraman endured days of drama after he had to retire, this served as further notice that you don't want to have to withdraw from Dakar, for any reason.

Further proof that Dakar riders are absolutely crazy: Isidre Esteve Pujol joins the list of top moto-rallyists to have a devastating accident. Unlike Fabrizio Meoni, Richard Sainct, Andy Caldecott, John Deacon etc., he survived, but may end up paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Fingers crossed for him that once the swelling subsides he'll regain use of legs.

Bored

This weekend was probably the first decent weekend of racing of 2007. The Dakar Rally was finishing up, the WRC opened its season and A1GP returned from its break. But none of these events were even remotely exciting.

Seb Loeb and Citroen won again at the Monte Carlo Rally, despite having a new car (this always creates the potential for reliability issues), and to make things worse, his team-mate Dani Sordo came second. The stages were devoid of unpredictable ice and snow, like usual, making it more like watching the old San Remo Rally. The final insult was the third leg which featured one measly stage, a superspecial on the streets of Monaco. They didn't even utilize the whole F1 track, and missed out the best bits (Casino Square, Lowes hairpin and the tunnel). LAME.

The Dakar Rally reached the famed Lac Rose, with no major drama. I'll admit that the final stage around the lake is always a processional humdrum affair so I wasn't surprised. What was surprising was that this Dakar seemed rather short of its own excitement for the whole 17 days. Oh sure, there was the dramatic crash and retirement of motorcycle leader Marc Coma, two days from the end, as well as the woes of Volkswagen after the rest day, but apart from that it was a pretty tame affair, with the robotically reliable Stephane Peterhansel taking a ninth victory, and seventh in a row for Mitsubishi. To be honest, I still think the best Dakar was a few years back where they went across the top of Africa and ended in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt.

Finally, Germany won in A1GP, again. This time they took both wins at Taupo, New Zealand.

Let's hope that the season starts to throw out some more interesting races and results soon. So, Chip Ganassi, don't you dare win the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona next weekend.

Martin Haven's Dakar blog

Top Eurosport commentator Martin Haven is off to the Dakar Rally for the first time and he's got a blog to prove it. You can find it here.

Martin's one of my favorite commentators and not often heard here in the USA, so I'm going to have to find the Eurosport coverage somewhere online.

Dakar is upon us

I'll be the first one to admit that writing about motorsport is definitely more difficult during the winter, with subject matter limited to silly-season newsbites, year-end reviews and previews of the next year's racing. But buried deep within the winter-racing news-sphere is the shining light of the Dakar Rally, arguably the toughest racing event in the world.

What started as a bunch of crazy Frenchman spending the first two weeks of the year racing through the Sahara has now turned into a massive event, with global media exposure and entry lists heaving with racing's glitterati. This year's iteration includes former World Rally champions Carlos Sainz, Miki Biasion and Ari Vatanen, NASCAR regular and Baja 1000 winner Robby Gordon, ex-Formula 1 driver Ukyo Katayama, Yvan Muller (one of the world's fastest touring car drivers), 1980s Group C sportscar pilot Jean-Louis Schlesser and a host of WRC drivers from past and present such as Markku Alen, Freddy Loix and Simon Jean-Joseph. The entry list even includes the son of legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, Paul, who has an extensive racing resume in his own right.

The course usually follows a similar format: two easy days in southern Europe, a ferry crossing to Morocco, some rocky stages in the Atlas mountains, then the meat of the race in the sand-dunes of Mauritania and Mali. The final few days are through more verdant parts of sub-Saharan Africa before the weary competitors view the mirage-like image of Dakar's Lac Rose (Pink Lake), which is the site of the finish.

Life on the Dakar is best described as like being part of a huge military exercise, where adverse conditions, lack of sleep, poor food and constant threat of injury or death are the norm. As the race moves into the toughest desert stages, entrants find it ever more difficult to stay on schedule - one minor mechanical failure can easily necessitate a night in the dunes waiting for an assistance vehicle to arrive. This will put the racer in the agonizing position of having to leave the next "bivouac" (Dakar's military-style name for rest-stop) almost as soon as they have arrived in order to get back on track.

To be honest, the daily TV coverage doesn't really do justice to the huge challenge of the event. Charley Boorman, whose circumnavigation of the globe on motorcyles with fellow actor Ewan MacGregor was chronicled in the TV show "Long Way Round", entered the 2006 event and brought along the LWR crew to record the experience. There doesn't exist a better chronicle of what the Dakar is really like. The resulting TV series, "The Race to Dakar", remains one of the most compelling docu-dramas I've ever seen, and I can only hope it ends up being broadcast in the USA.

Which brings us to the status of Dakar in the United States... After two years of daily coverage on the Speed Channel, the race moved to the Outdoor Life Network in 2005. OLN dipped their toes in the water with five one-hour documentary-style shows, as a precurser to more in-depth coverage in the future. Pleased with the reception to the sport they switched to daily recaps in 2006 - by utilizing much of the same crew and production values as their Tour de France coverage, they were guaranteed a reasonable level of quality. At the same time, it definitely appeared as though they were unclear on the true nature of the race. We had a daily giggle as presenter Kirsten Gum's beautifully-trimmed hair became ever flatter and nastier before finally retreating under a Dakar baseball cap, never to be seen again (at least until the Tour de France in July).

There's hope that OLN (now renamed "Versus") will be able to spread the word of the Dakar to more mainstream sports fans in the USA. The presence of a NASCAR driver helps, as does a significant number of Americans in the motorcycle class, some of which are part of KTM's big-budget Red Bull effort. It also helps that off-road racing and rallying have never been more in the public consciousness than they are now, thanks to the defection of top X-Games star Travis Pastrana to the sport. Pastrana's high-profile helped rallying nab a place in the X-Games in 2006 and his nail-biting win over 1995 World Rally champion Colin McRae sealed the deal. Rallying is beginning to be hot property in the US, and its most extreme form, the desert racing of the Dakar, is surely not far behind.

The Dakar Rally starts on Versus TV on January 6th at 12:30pm Pacific.

Dakar-nage

In the last few days we have been watching Charley Boorman (of Long Way Round fame) in his new adventure show, Race to Dakar. It chronicles his assault on the 2006 Dakar Rally, from prep to race, and focuses not just on his experience but on those of his team-mates and support crew.

I've been watching the Dakar for 4 years now, since Speed Channel first showed it on a daily basis. It's compelling on many levels. Firstly there's the race itself: basically, who's winning. Secondly, the environment is spectacular. You can't fail to be moved by the dramatic North African ergs, seas of Sahara dunes and dense sub-Saharan bush. Thirdly, the endurance required of all people involved in the rally is amazing. Watching humans who are being pushed to their limits is always intriguing. Finally, there's the massive scale of the operation. Moving that much stuff in those kind of conditions is a huge feat, one that puts a Pink Floyd tour to shame.

TV coverage tends to not focus so much on the last of these factors, so it was extremely revealing to watch the footage that Charley and his crew captured. My partner and I met when we were crew managers on what used to be called the California AIDS Ride, another event that is an example of logistical achievement. The premise of that event was a bicycle ride that had 3000 riders and 600 support crew travelling from San Francisco to LA in seven days. What we saw the Race to Dakar guys experience brought back some vivid memories: very early mornings, camping in the cold, very average food, lack of sleep, lack of hygiene, long hours, dust, sunburn, you name it... In an environment like that, even the smallest thing is difficult. For us it could have been something like running out of clean ice at a pitstop area. For them, a cracked lower wishbone on a support vehicle 250kms from the bivouac disrupted their entire plan.

When I watch Dakar 2007, I'll be watching through new eyes. In the past I longed to work on the event, and even went so far as to apply (and be soundly rejected by organizers ASO). I've changed my mind. There's other ways to get your logistical jollies - stage rallies and desert racing comes to mind. I've always fancied a trip to Baja. I'm getting on a dirtbike for the first time next month, so that should indicate whether I'll end up at Baja as a rider, crew member or volunteer...