Five minutes to plan for 400 miles
Also among rallying’s unsung heroes are co-drivers – more so on the Dakar than anywhere else, discovers Piers Ward
ou wake up, you get shaken around all day and you go to bed.” As far as job descriptions go, it’s nothing if not to the point. The speaker is Dennis Murphy, co-driver to Giniel de Villiers in car #205, and it’s fair to say that he ticks most of the South African clichés of a wadi-dry wit.
If the mechanics are the unsung heroes of the Dakar, the navigators run them a close second, having a level of responsibility that can mean the difference between a win and a retirement.
Park all your preconceptions about co-drivers in the World Rally Championship. Each stage in the Dakar is longer than an entire WRC event, and every single one of those stages is a step into the absolute unknown. They get no reconnaissance runs, no maps and no satellite images – instead, just a series of organiser-supplied route notes five minutes ahead of the off, a 900,000-square-mile desert and only a rough idea about where to head.
Five minutes to plan a 400-mile route across virgin desert. To most people, those five minutes would be panic central, with all sorts of Corporal Jones moments and plenty of flapping. But Murphy isn’t most people.
“We get the road book beamed into our display screen, wait five minutes and then the bouncing starts,” he says. “I check for speed zones [where the speed is restricted around hazards like animals or houses], but I don’t go through the book.
“YThere’s way too much information. So I scan the first 10 pages, trying to work out what sort of terrain it will be, and then get ready.” Weirdly, the navigators prefer this lack of preparation. Previously, road notes were handed out the night before, so teams would spend hours trying to work out the best route. With this new method, sleep is easier to come by.
There are two screens in front of Murphy. The left contains the road book while the right is his checkpoint table for the waypoints. These are a series of virtual points dotted across the desert – well over 100 per stage – that the car needs to hit. Otherwise, a time penalty is applied.
Murphy works most of the car’s switches from his side and has a remote control for his screens (a touchscreen doesn’t work overly well in this sort of terrain), but he readily admits that he can’t even see the monitors a lot of the time, so violent are the bumps. Headaches? “Plenty. I carry tablets in the door.” There’s no one-size-fitsall type of co-driver. Trust between the driver and the navigator is vital, but the way people achieve that varies. Murphy has a good relationship with de Villiers, but they don’t socialise outside of the cockpit, whereas Al-attiyah and Mathieu Baumel even go on holidays together. Whatever works for whichever crew. The pressure and skill level are off the scale. But there are advantages to the job: co-drivers are part of the driver line-up so get to sleep in a motorhome and can have some downtime in the evenings.
That’s not the case for Pierre Calmon. He has done nine Dakars and is partaking this year in a MAN TGA truck, acting as the co-driver in a three-man support crew for three buggies. The third crew member is the mechanic.
If you’re new to Dakar, let me explain what seven levels of hell these people operate in. As the bikes, quads, cars and buggies track across the desert, these 11-tonne behemoths follow, carrying all the spares in case anything goes wrong with the ‘principals’. So they quite literally drive a lorry across the desert, setting off after everyone else, rescuing people they come across, not eating anything all day and quite often getting into the bivouac well after midnight.
Calmon and I were Whatsapping while I was in Saudi and one message came in at 1.40am: “Just getting into my tent.”
The support trucks are timed, but with repairs on their mind and ‘only’ 500bhp at their disposal, they’re not eligible nor likely to get on the podium. There are also racing trucks, with 1000bhp and propshafts as thick as Sir Chris Hoy’s thighs, but they carry no spares so hustle across the desert as quickly as they can navigate it.
The truckers’ world is different. As Calmon delicately puts it: “When you’re f****d, you’re really f****d in a truck.”
Once in South America, they had to call in the army to get one out, literally building a road through the wilderness to rescue someone who had got stuck. Another time, organisers had to helicopter-drop food and water to eight that were beached beyond immediate rescue.
So Calmon is vital. Whereas the cars and bikes can tackle most obstacles, obviously a truck needs to forge a different path. In a 200km day, they will easily do an extra 15km, because they can’t go up the same dunes. Night driving is also an extra level of complication.
As Calmon explains: “If you see a single set of tracks going off in a different direction, you will know
❝ You need big balls, as you can’t be scared of the desert ❞
that’s a truck. You need big balls, as you can’t be scared of the desert.”
Calmon goes through three phases during a Dakar: love, questioning, never do it again. Then two months later he will sign up for the following year.
As you spend time with him, you can at least begin to understand his decision. Like the mechanics, there’s a great sense of camaraderie among the truckers (“you always stop for a truck”), with the crews helping each other out and making sure everyone makes it through.
The organisers put on a prizegiving every evening, handing out awards for the stage wins in each class but also decorating any crew that made an outstanding rescue.
It’s the Dakar way and perhaps its most surprising characteristic. Because in the maelstrom of all the competitive testosterone (men are in the vast majority here), big budgets and sleep-deprived people, it’s the sheer openness of it that leaves a lasting impression. Not for Dakar the fencing and 15 different passes to get within 100 metres of a driver: head for the start of a stage and you can chat casually to global stars like Stéphane Peterhansel just after they’ve relieved themselves over the side of dune.
It’s a different world. It’s the Dakar world.
L