Sooner than expected the famed and feared Dakar Rally arrived. The last few months had flown by as I scurried around with some lastminute preparations for this 15 day, 9000km race. What gear to take? What spare parts would I need? How much warm gear do I take for the crossing of the Andes Mountains at sub-zero temperatures? These were just some of the questions I asked myself, after all this was my first Dakar. I’ve been following this event from an early age and it has always been a dream of mine to take part, so when my title sponsor, Broadlink, suggested we go, I didn’t think twice. Making the decision was the easy part, getting selected by the ASO from a stream of entries was much harder. In addition, the bike capacity had been reduced to 450ccs and the general entry criteria was much stricter. I can’t begin to describe my elation when, a few weeks later, I received confirmation that my entry had been accepted. My start number was 144 and it was game on! Alfie Cox, Ingo Waldschmidt and any other competitor will tell you just how big your commitment has to be to enter the Dakar. I can only compare it to the Tour de France, but if there was an Olympics for motorcycles, that would be my litmus test. The event is simply massive, drawing the attention of millions of spectators and fans from around the world.
78 • DO IT NOW April | May 2012
Many months of preparation later, I was finally on the plane to Buenos Aires to fulfil my lifelong dream. The container, with four race bikes and 10 supporters’ bikes, was delayed and left us pretty stressed out, and for good reason. To cut a long story short, our bikes only arrived in Mar del Plata at 9pm the night before the race! It was a mad rush to get our back-up truck packed and all the navigational equipment fitted to the bikes in time for the scrutineering, which took place a mere hour before the start of the race at 6am. This inspection is completely nerve wracking because if anything is not right, it could mean the end of the race before it had even begun. Thankfully, the bikes passed the scrutineering and we were allowed to start! It was the latest that anyone had been allowed to start in the history of the Dakar ... thank you ASO. With only two hours of sleep I was already exhausted as I set off that morning on the 860km leg, which included a short 60km special. I started off in 144th place, as I was unseeded in the rally world and thrown into the rookie class. As the race crossed Argentina, I managed to work my way closer to the front, the trick was to only ride as fast as you can navigate. The liaison sections, which are the regularity stages between racing sections, were really long, but the thousands of spectators along the way took my mind off the stress from the night before, and I now had a different kind of pressure to cope with; the road book. This was my biggest challenge adapting to the rally style of off-road racing. The road book is a paper map scroll mounted to the dashboard along with two ICO meters, a cap repeater and a Unik