PEOPLE, EVENTS AND RIDES
Ordinary bloke enters Dakar, tyres, North York Moors…
In 2006, when I was 15 years old, I did a twoweek work placement at BMW Off-road Skills (ORS). It was a pivotal moment in my life. Nearly all of the instructors at the time had Dakar inisher’s medals and hearing their crazy stories from the event just blew my mind and made me want to get into racing.
Two years later my first race was the Dawn to Dusk enduro. As the name suggests, it’s a 12-hour race, which I did as a two-man team with Llewelyn Pavey. The lap was 15 miles of tough forestry trails that would take most riders under an hour. My first (and only) lap took me three-and-a-half hours. I literally could have walked it quicker... I was destroyed when I passed the transponder to Llewelyn to finish the race.but even though it nearly killed me, that day is still one of the highlights of my career. It showed I had the resilience to never give up and always get to the finish line.
By 2015 I’d got a proper job at ORS and my colleague Neil Hawker said that he wanted to go to Dakar in 2020. Neil is a properly skilled rider and was more than good enough to go the next year if he wanted, but just needed time to raise funds. At the time my riding wasn’t good enough, but I reckoned that in five years I’d be able to get to the necessary standard.
I did the Serres Rally in Greece in 2015, then again in 2017, improving my navigation and race craft every time. It was probably Serres 2017 I realised that Dakar could really be ‘on’.in the last five years I’ve probably put about £25,000 of my own money into racing and getting to the position where I can even think about entering Dakar. That’s without the £60k it’s going to cost to do the race itself.
In October I went to Dubai to train in the desert.
I broke my collarbone. It wasn’t a bad break, but required surgery and as there were just 12 weeks to Dakar, and as I was flying from Dubai on to Australia I thought it’d be smart to get the operation done in Dubai. I managed to get a surgery slot the next day.
After surgery my shoulder started to really hurt so I sent my X-rays to a friend in the UK who is an orthopaedic surgeon. The surgeon in Dubai had used something called a hook plate; apparently it’s a pretty dated technique, and in my case had been poorly executed.
The metalwork would have to come out once the fracture had healed and would give me limited range of motion, plus pain and discomfort until then.
The day after leaving hospital my girlfriend and I flew to Australia. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. The confined space made it impossible to get comfortable. I’d think I was in a good spot then something would move and I’d be in five minutes of agony. Screaming on a scheduled flight doesn’t go down well.
At this point, Dakar was off. While on the plane I’d drafted a statement to put out on Facebook, an apology to sponsors, and I was thinking about the money I’d have to give back to people who’d bought sponsorship packs. There was no way I could race Dakar with that hook plate in.
I landed in Australia on the Thursday and messaged a mate to see if he could recommend a surgeon to look at my shoulder. I managed to get an appointment the next day. The surgeon basically repeated what my friend in the UK had said; the metalwork would have to come out and be replaced as soon as possible to limit the damage the hook was doing to my shoulder and a new plate inserted to get the bone healing.
Five days later (and nine days after the initial break) I’m under the knife again, and this time it’s a proper fix. I asked the surgeon if I could keep the old metalwork. It’s definitely getting cable-tied to my Dakar bike somewhere. Maybe it’ll come in handy at some point...
Obviously this has had a huge effect on my preparations, but I just see it as another bump in the road. It was never going to be easy, it’s just a little bit more dicult now. Three weeks, and several trips to the oxygen chamber, later I’m training again and I’ll be back on an enduro bike next week. My race bike still needs sorting though. It’s a Yamaha
WR450F Rally, but is currently spread across two continents. The frame is being modified in France while the rest of it is in Dubai waiting to be assembled. I’ll be heading out there in early December to help build it and learn how it all works. I’ll also go for a few rides on it just for a bit of a shakedown.
I was gutted when they first announced the race was leaving South America and would run in Saudi Arabia in 2020, but now they’ve started releasing images of the terrain in Saudi, it’s ramped up my excitement massively. We’ll be some of the first people to explore the place by motorbike. I don’t think the change of country itself will make the race inherently more or less dicult, but with sunset before 18:00 a lot more people will be finishing in the dark every day.
In past years I’ve been glued to the live timing screen on the Dakar website, following my heroes as they go from way point to way point. There’s also a great site by a Dutch guy calledtrackingdakar.nlwhich presents the information really effectively.
Of course, there’s the Eurosport coverage every night, but this only covers front runners and gives just five minutes to the bikes. The best way to watch it now is on social media. Every rider will have a Facebook or Twitter page and they will be posting updates regularly, or they’ll have someone doing it for them.i’m Simonhewittdakar on Facebook. Wish me luck.
‘Screaming on a scheduled flight doesn’t go down well’