honda whisperer posted:

Thanks for doing this. It was very cool last year.

Supradog posted:

I know last year(or was that 2 years ago, drat COVID) there where some ytube channels with some coverage of the Dakar. But ive apperantly pruned them or they're not active anymore.

What's the channels or cooler smaller time teams that will do an effort on media this year?

McTinkerson posted:

I am absolutely pumped for the classics class that was added last year.

https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/cars/after-34-years-niva-red-legend-team-taking-lada-niva-back-dakar
There's even a Niva competing!

Edit: 134 cars and 18 trucks!
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=dakar&set=a.4621677251224879

Elviscat posted:

Oh cool, I'm on time to follow the rally in real time this year!

busalover posted:

Why is this still called Dakar and not Saudi Baja Blast?

Anyway, I caught a video interview with a Dakar motorcyclist the other day, had a horrible accident and basically had to rebuild himself physically and mentally. Pretty moving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWl1GpJ5AOo

e: oh woops it's in the op. my bad.

Vampire Panties posted:

Thank you for posting this OP. The Dakar rally is one of those mythical things that I know what it is, but the only three things i know about it are:

- its extraordinarily difficult
- its cool AF
- they hang out delivery trucks

Very excited to follow along with this thread

builds character posted:

You may remember three exclamation marks in the road books from such hits as “Rest in Peace Mr Quintanilla.”
https://youtu.be/f1Kym9RsT3Y

He was in second, ripping to try to catch up on the last stage. It did not work.

busalover posted:

fml that hurt

e: lol and he gets up and keeps riding!

busalover posted:

If you're tired of hunting down the relevant info on Instagram, Youtube, etc., the Dakar subreddit is pretty convenient https://old.reddit.com/r/DAKAR/

builds character posted:

? Yeah… uh, about that.

Elviscat posted:

I was all like "wow look at all those tire irons to change that tire"

Then I realized they weren't tire irons...

builds character posted:

OK, now on to the boogeyman of Dakar, the mapmengetting run over by a gently caress-off huge thousand+ horsepower truck. e: Just kidding, big digression about race strategy first. Then mapmen.

If you have a bunch of racers using a little strip of paper they get the night before to navigate hundreds of miles through the desert at race pace, you might say "well, just do your best and try not to die!" That would have been a fine strategy until someone else came along and said "you don't really have to do all that navigation if you just follow the tracks of the dude in front." This led to some interesting race strategy because the start order for each day is based on the finish order for the prior day. Fastest yesterday? You get to be out front today! (unless you are an "elite" rider and you finish below 15th or 20th in which case you start at 15th or 20th, I forget which so that you're not putting anyone in danger by charging through a bunch of slow folks for the whole stage) Riders at the top are released with three minute gaps and they're all roughly the same fast so you're not super likely to catch more than one or two people on a stage.

Being out front is bad. You do not want to be out front because then you have to navigate + ride really fast. It's a lot easier to just check the navigation work of the guy in front of you + ride really fast if you're like third. It's even easier to just follow the tracks of the nine guys in front of you if you can manage it and even better because you can probably catch one or two and then you get to watch them go over bumps instead of reading terrain.

So what top riders do sometimes is intentionally get speeding penalties by going too fast through little villages along the way or things like that. Usually just a minute or two so that they can be super fast but not have to open up the next day's stage. Here are the results from the stage today

1 001 - TOBY PRICE (AUS) KTM 3h57m33s
2 005 - PABLO QUINTANILLA (CHL) HUSQVARNA +00:01:12
3 006 - ANDREW SHORT (USA) HUSQVARNA +00:02:31
4 009 - RICKY BRABEC (USA) HONDA +00:03:03
5 002 - MATTHIAS WALKNER (AUT) KTM +00:06:54

Ricky Brabec finished fifth yesterday and riders start three minutes apart. Price finished sixth on the stage yesterday. So what happened is Toby Price made up his three minutes on Brabec but then couldn't shake him (again, because it's tough to go faster than someone if you're not a lot faster because they don't have to read the terrain. for example, they can just see you go down a little dip and judge by how far you go whether or not they need to slow vs. you who see a dip you can't see down and need to actually slow for it).

Tomorrow, Price will have to open up the stage, followed by Quintanilla and then short and then Brabec. That means Brabec can mostly just follow the tracks of the first three and should probably be trying to pad his lead. If Price takes time off him tomorrow or keeps it even, Brabec is in trouble.

Anyway, strategy isn't enough. You also have to do things that the rules don't explicitly prohibitcheat.

You see, it's tough riding at race pace while navigating, let alone opening up the race. But... you get the road book (well, you used to anyway) the night before and then you have time to mark it up with pretty colors. Like red for "oh poo poo stop there's something bad here" or green for "this is a serious turn, pay attention."


The thing is, if you have the roadbook and you know where you are and where you're going then you can also just go on google maps and look at satellite images of the race course. Instead of having to visualize what the track looks like, you can actually just take a look. And, even better, you can pay someone else to take a look at it for you while you're having a massage or dinner or something and then they can explain it to you and what you're going to be facing. That's a real advantage. It's one thing to be like "huh, roadbook says I need to make a slight right at kilometer 145.2" and another to see the pictures and say "oh, there's a system of ravines here and there are actually three and I have to take the middle one because if I take the right one it's more of a harder right and I'll be screwed if I just read 'right' and take it."

So that's step one of mapmen. They take the roadbook and figure out where it is using satellite images and then explain that to the riders and give the factory teams a nice advantage. But, of course, just that wasn't enough.

Take a look at this picture, because this is the real evolution of mapmen.


Last year, Kevin Benavides, a fast dude who rides for Honda, was caught with those notes on his tank. He was given a three hour penalty (which was eventually revoked months later after an appeal because ASO only put in the rules prohibiting carrying notes like that the day before and didn't tell anyone about them until that day and the rider start at like 5 AM so fat lot of good that had done him).

You see, the other job of the mapmen is to figure out the course and then figure out how you can cut the course without missing the probable waypoints. So there, he might have had to ride at say 30 mph if he had stayed on the course according to the road book and taken that hard left. But someone saw that he could just go straight a little more and then just blaze through the nice hard, flat dirt and be a lot faster and so he took modified notes that told him when to cut the course and like an idiot he just taped them onto his bike for everyone to see and take pictures of and ruined it for everyone. Oops.

Fast forward to this year and there are two new rules. First, every other day (I think... it's a little unclear and I don't speak french) instead of getting the roadbook the night before, you get it the morning of and have 25 minutes to mark it up in a little corral before starting. That's a big deal and makes it basically impossible for the mapmen to do their job. But it's only half of the stages (maybe less?). Second, the liaison stages are being provided by GPS now. So rather than getting them in the roadbook, they get uploaded directly every morning. That makes things a LOT harder for the mapmen because even if you know the general area you're going to be racing through - because you know where that day's bivouac is and where that night's bivouac is - it's a lot harder to figure out where the roadbook is taking you if you don't know where it starts. Not impossible, but more difficult.

Here's one more example I found from Benavides's notes. You can see just how good it would be to ditch that rough terrain and speed down the beach.

builds character posted:

This is the first thing that happens.


Everyone is racing along and all, following the roadbook, getting stuck in some nonsense those jerks dreamt up for you to suffer when a guy takes a “wrong” turn and suddenly it’s a shortcut over much more forgiving terrain. That’s really it - cutting the course in ways that don’t seem too off if you’re the ASO looking at gps but that are a significant advantage in time, energy and risk.

In the example above, you just “miss” the turn, go a little ways further south and suddenly you’re racing WOT on nice smooth sand instead of that chopped up rough stuff with bushes and gullies.

The other way is this.


That’s from today’s stage. Doesn’t look so bad? When you’re down there, how are you supposed to figure out which of those little washes to go up? Having someone who has pictures of the route (remember, even this year someone literally flew a plane over the whole route ahead of time) and walking your racers through potentially tricky parts is a huge advantage. Imagine seeing thirty different washes but your man back at the bivouac showed you a picture and helped you out “just count and left at #7” and you’re off while everyone else at best hesitates and at worse takes a wrong turn and loses ten minutes.

Elviscat posted:

I was all like "wow look at all those tire irons to change that tire"

Then I realized they weren't tire irons...

builds character posted:

builds character posted:

Vampire Panties posted:

When I first saw the pic, I was like 'huh blown CV shaft, seems like its universal. At least it all tears apart pretty easily... hrrmm the cv-shaft looks fine.. OH. Oh. ohhhhhh'

OP thanks again for this. Watching the video highlights and seeing the pictures is fascinating. Who knew a ditch could be so problematic

Thats an impressive testament for Method wheels.

This is a fantastic pic

builds character posted:

meowmeowmeowmeow posted:

thanks for these daily updates, just started following but enjoying the posts.

I kinda follow baja-style desert racing, is there a reason trophy trucks/buggies arent more common in the dakar? I have done zero research on this, figured I'd just ask - saw the Menzies crash so I figure they're out there?

Sam Sunderland posted:

The desert will always be your biggest competition, ROUGH DAY! Km 200 I hit my disk on a rock and bent it so was was without a rear brake (seems to be a habit of mine) then at km 300 while searching for a waypoint in the rocks I was looking down to check the gps and hit a big rock and had a barely dingle right out the front door and gave my head and shoulder a good whack the rest of the stage (160km) was survival mode with no rear brake and lack off focus made for some character building 🥸Still leading the overall which is a nice positive after day like that! We will try to learn from it and look forward to tomorrow! 🔨💪🏻🤘🏻

Petrucci posted:

I took a bad flight at km 60 to avoid a camel. It was a group of camels and the only black one came towards me ... I had to go off the road but it was full of holes and bumps and I I was thrown to the ground. Today I pushed to the end and I'm happy with how it went. It was a good stage, even if I didn't feel at my best on the dunes also because of an ankle that hurts me .

busalover posted:

What's in the back of those Dakar trucks? Nothing? Water, to meet a certain weight threshold?

builds character posted:

Mostly nothing, but they do carry tools and spare tires which are huge. It also depends on if they're one of the trucks that's really racing or a support truck entered into the race with the real purpose of carrying spare parts. If the latter, spare parts. You can see from this video that there really isn't a whole lot in there though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSY57hck9s