"Yamaha Ténéré We first saw these beauties in Southern Spain around 1986. They were ridden by the coolest looking Frenchmen in the world. When I saw these guys they were en route to the ferry to Morocco. A life "
2010 Dakar Rally (Displaced)
The Christmas and New Year period means a lot of different things to many different people. But for a bunch of offroading lunatics in every automotive genre, it means a couple of weeks of hard toil, sickening adrenalin rushes and questionable ethical conundrems.
Yes, the Dakar Rally may be one of the global televisual highlights of the international motorsport calender around this time of the year, but there is an undeniable aesthetic and moral difficulty in thrashing one’s fuel guzzler through pristine natural environments populated by excruciatingly poor people.
It may be, as in all things Motorsport, that there are a myriad of ways to justify the event. Each year the rally brings much needed focus and revenue to local economies; car and bike companies use the race as a testbed for endurance, fuel consumption and other technologies that will eventually trickle down to production models and thereby increase the possibility of a sustainable motoring future.
It’s undeniable that these easily spinn-able justifications don’t detract from the fact that untrammeled off-road, point-to-point freedom is an increasingly rare privilege of the super wealthy and the companies they run.
But each year, stone me if we don’t want to go in one of those massive wheeled, über-powered trucks.
So, wether or not you believe this sort of global traveling circus is cricket or not, you can follow the action and battle with your demons via the Dakar Website.
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Dakar is perhaps the single greatest spectacle of motorsport left in the world. While an increasingly litigious society has effectively prohibited any actual routes from Paris to Dakar, and xenophobic religious lunatics have forced the event to be run on a third continent entirely, there is no other race on earth like Dakar. F1 oozes technology, pomp and circumstance on the finest prepared courses 'round the world, but it is Dakar, where man and machine go where they were likely not meant to go, get stuck, dig out, persevere and overcome adversity that truly inspires. It is the ultimate extension of the freedom represented by the motor vehicle.
As for the unconscionable thought of taking advantage of the weak and powerless along the route, consider the efforts of Mark Jennings-Bates and Mick Extance of rally4life.org. They are currently training to be ready to enter a Bowler Nemesis in the 2011 Dakar while raising $4M for charitable organizations in the region which focus on providing clean water and sanitation. How exciting is it to imagine a rally team in a snarling Bowler Nemesis clawing its way through the dunes as a means to saving some 200,000 lives?
This is a splendid event and the “so called do gooders” who knock it are to be pitied. When it suits us we use pristine land for our own purpose, but we only see critisism of these sporting/testing events. We use(exploit) poorer peoples for our own benefit when it suits (cheap clothes). CO2? It.s small fry compared to our reluctance to use nuclear power