African Dust – Rally du Moroc – part 1

Note – I have made it a custom to tell stories about my racing on Think Daily.  I think there are lessons there.  Many people say they like my accounts.  If you find you aren’t interested in my race stories, please don’t unsubscribe.  We’ll be back to our regular format soon enough.

When I wrote about my adventures racing the Baja 1000 in Mexico, I referred to it as the “longest non-stop off road race in the world”.  It’s true.  It is.  But one cynical commenter said “Dakar is longer.” 

That’s all it took I suppose.

 

I investigated.  I knew a little.  I had to know more.  “Dakar” is a 13-day rally race.  In a rally, you race the designated section each day, and they add your daily times together to determine who was in what place.  If you finish faster, you have more time to work on your machine and rest.  If you break your machine out there, you have less time to rest.

 

Originally the race was “Paris to Dakar”.  It started in Paris and ended in Dakar Senegal, in northwest Africa.  That’s far.  But at some point, the gangs in northern Africa were robbing people.  Even the guys laying out the course.  I heard one motorcycle rider say they took everything from him, stripped him naked, and left him there.  He was really scared they’d kill him. 

 

So the race promoter moved the race to South America for a handful of years.  Bolivia, Argentina, Peru.  Then they moved the race to Saudi Arabia a number of years ago.  That’s where it is this year.  All 6000 kilometers of it.

 

I thought….I need to do this before I die.  And there is no better time than now.  Let’s go.

 

I investigated.  I couldn’t just enter the race.  I had to qualify.  It makes sense.  They don’t want clueless people who don’t know what they are doing showing up and messing things up.

 

How do I qualify?  I had to race another FIA rally race.  Where can I do that?  Morocco. Ok, when is it?  October.  Ok, how do I do that?  Do I ship my UTV?  Where do you stay?  How does the race go?  I know the navigation is different than the GPS navigation they use in Baja, but how do you load it, read it, and follow it?  How do the pits work?  Food?  Flights?  How soon do you have to go beforehand?

 

So many questions.  This is how it is when you do something way out of your box.

 

“Morocco” – sounds cool.  Casablanca.  Marrakesh.  Rally in the desert.  Sand dunes.  Sounded like it would be worth the effort – especially if it got me a ticket to Dakar.

I started excavating some hard-to-find answers to my questions.

 

I employed a key question I use in business.  Instead of asking “How do I do this?”, I asked, “Who can help me?”  If I get the right who, they’d have the answers to how.

 

I found one race support company called South Racing.  They had an arrive-and-drive program.  You write the check and show up.  They take care of the rest (mostly).  You have to drive the race car.

 

There was one problem.  I needed a codriver.  The codriver sits in the passenger seat and looks at two screens in front of him for hours and calls the turns to me.  In Baja the codriver was important to make sure I don’t miss a turn, and give me the confidence to go faster.  As I would learn, in Morocco and Dakar, the codriver would be able to read to complex “road book” symbols and prevent you from getting lost. 

 

In Baja, you are on well-worn paths that are very rough and wavy.  In Morocco, you are in open desert a lot where there are no tracks, or lots of intersecting dirt roads.  It would be very easy to get lost.

 

Who can be my codriver who knows road book navigation and the Rally format?  I asked and asked.  Nobody was coming up who was available.  This is a small group.  There aren’t many people in the world who have done this.  And if they are doing it, they are committed to a team already.

 

I persist.  I found one candidate – Andrew Short.  Andrew was a retired pro motocross and supercross racer.  I had watched him on TV for many years.  He was a cool guy that I knew I’d get along with well.  He had raced Dakar a handful of times on a motorcycle and then switched to being a four-wheeled rally navigator.  Perfect!  I called him.  He was available. 

 

Simultaneously another name came up.  Bruno Jacomy from Argentina.  He was a professional rally navigator.  This is what he did. 

 

A navigator (co-driver) needs to be a good mechanic.  If the car breaks, they need to fix it.  Bruno was the better mechanic according to Andrew.  I chose Bruno.

 

Now I had my team together to give me the right advice and answer all my rookie questions. 

 

I didn’t know what to expect really.  You have visions but know that until you get there, you really won’t know what is coming.  I hoped something exciting would happen – a story worth telling.  So I brought my video specialist – Ted Waldron. We’d collect video and see what story unfolded.  Me and Ted – and Bruno when we got there.

 

I booked my flights.

 

Here we go…