The Dakar rally is no ordinary motor race – participants need to be prepared, writes Justin Hynes
IF YOU don’t look behind you, up the hill, towards the sprawl of multi-coloured Spanish colonial houses, this could be the Dakar Rally as the purists want it. Late afternoon in Valparaiso and a vicious breeze is kicking up a dust storm in the rally’s rest day bivouac. Looking down the boulevards of battered cars and mud-caked trucks, the dust momentarily casts the kind of light you’re used to seeing in Dakar videos. Squint and it could be Morocco or Mauritania.
But it’s not. On the other side of the bivouac is the Pacific. On the streets, hawkers are selling churros; a few kilometres up the coast in the resort of Viña del Mar, rally leader Carlos Sainz is giving interviews in the five-star Sheraton Miramar hotel.
This is not how it’s supposed to be. The Dakar is about a tent village in the most inhospitable territory imaginable. It’s about fleets of vast Antonov transport planes airlifting in supplies and the thrum of chopper blades at dawn.
The move to Buenos Aires in Argentina across the Andes to Chile and back, occasioned after the 2008 event was cancelled on the eve of the race following French government warning of potential terrorist threat, isn’t right. Hotels and hot showers? It’s too damn civilised.
Sainz, though, begs to differ. To counter the purists who have insisted that moving the Dakar emasculates the “world’s toughest motorsport event”, the Volkswagen driver raises his hands. Each is covered in a patchwork of bandages; his fingers are puffy and red.
“It’s tough,” he says, succinctly. “Two hundred kilometres without power steering. You feel it. Your body really tells you if you had a hard day like I had – you really feel it.”
Ask him about the notorious stage five, in which torrential rain caused the stage to be abandoned and the exit of almost 50 per cent of the motorcycle field, and he winces. “So far we have done the first week, which was supposed to be easy. It has been” – he permits himself a wry chuckle – “a difficult week.
“I don’t know what to expect now. Theoretically, the hardest part of the rally is coming next week. I agree that maybe the organisers tried to prepare a route in a way that people will not remember Africa so much. I hope it’s not too much.”
It’s a sentiment echoed throughout the bivouac; this Dakar is the toughest ever. In the McRae Enduro Sport area, former WRC driver and team boss Alistair McRae is amazed to even be in Valparaiso with three cars still running.
“I don’t think anyone expected it to be this tough. I came expecting that on a 400km stage you might have 100km of really hard stuff. But it’s more like 300. Every day.”
If it’s been tough for the manufacturer-backed teams and their fleets of support vehicles, for the privateers it’s been something approaching hell. In a tucked-away corner of the bivouac, Philip Noone knows all too well. He and fellow Dubliner Gary Ennis have beaten the odds and made it into the 50 per cent of bikes to have made it halfway.
But he almost failed. On the perilous stage five, he got caught in the rain. “The dunes were awful,” he says. “The sand was so heavy you’d get to a crest and the bike would just sink. . . You had to push the engine incredibly hard to get over.”
With the result that he burned out the clutch. Rescued by a 4x4 driver, he trekked 70km to the bivouac, picked up replacement parts and at 3.30am found himself in the freezing desert repairing his bike. Despite fitting a new clutch, a piston problem halted him and he spent the night in the dunes, wrapped in foil.
“It is the hardest thing you can do,” he says, shifting an ice pack from one swollen set of knuckles to the other. “The rally knocks the stuffing out of you.”
Despite the hardships, there’s never a thought of quitting. “That night on the fifth stage, locals were asking if I was sure about going to the desert, but if I hadn’t I’d have been out. I had to go. It’s going to get tougher, but we’ll take what they throw at us.”
What will be thrown at the racers is the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth. No one is looking forward to it.
Contemplating how to approach the next phase, Sainz is lost for words. He raises his eyebrows, shrugs. “With a lot of respect,” he says simply.
On Sunday, on the more forgiving boulevards of Buenos Aires, one driver will be crowned the winner. Everything else will fade into obscurity. It is a harsh reality, and hardly fitting reward for the monumental effort that goes into simply completing the Dakar.
Sainz is the first to agree. “Winning? I don’t know. I just know we are in the middle of an incredible race. . . I have been long enough in motorsport to know that there is still a long way to go to Buenos Aires. First you have to beat the Dakar.”
Noone agrees. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I make the finish. I’ll have to try and take it all in, but I don’t know how.”
If he does, will it signal closure on a dreamhe’s nursed since his teens? “I don’t know – I might come back. There’s something mysterious and beautiful about the Dakar; it’s hard to describe. I’ve seen some amazing things. Despite the hardship, there are real ‘wow’ moments.”
Sainz is unsure about his Dakar future, too. “The challenge is only to finish the Dakar. After that. . . who knows?”
Gary Ennis and Philip Noone’s efforts can be followed live within the tracking area at dakar.com