Ned Suesse Dakar Rally Update #2 – Dirt Rider Magazine

www.neduro.com emblazoned bike.December 31st: Day Before Dakar
I’m a little bit amped up right now, as you can probably imagine. The bikes are all in parc ferme (impound for all intents and purposes) so they’re gone. So today we got up and packed everything we’ll need in the support truck. That involves organizing a lot of stuff, obviously. At about noon we had to head over to the briefing, photo for the race and then we took a whirlwind tour of cluster ness. Essentially we took a bus from the podium area back to parc ferme and our bikes. Then, we rode the bikes back to the podium, over the podium and back to the parc ferme area. Then we took a bus back to the podium. It was a very inefficient cluster-bomb that involved a lot of standing around in a hot field. There is, however, a very awesome part to all of this.I don’t know if it was millions of people who came out to watch the ceremonial start but it was certainly a lot of people lining the closed-off streets to see the vehicles, bikes and racers ride off the podium and through the city for a few kilometers. Being one of those riders was awesome. I have a few rules in my life and one of those rules is that whenever the opportunity presents itself for me to ride a wheelie past a cop and have said cop nod at me approvingly, I’m going to do it. I got to do that a lot today and it was tremendously fun.After that we dropped the bikes back at parc ferme and by then we’d received our road books and took our time getting back to the house where Jonah Street, Bill Cogner and I went over those. Tomorrow we head over at about 5:15 a.m. to the start and get this thing going.The first stage has something like a 150 km of liaison (transfer), a 60 km special (timed) and then 600 km or something of final transfer into the finish line. It’s a lot of mileage but not a lot of special. It’s going to be a long day on the road.In general I feel really great going into the race. I’m still a little down on sleep but compared to other people’s headaches I’m doing great. There are still people waiting for bikes to arrive and the race starts in the morning. Shipping was a crapshow this year—more than normal from what I’m hearing and I got off lucky even though our bikes and supplies were a little late.The Bike is how I want it to be. My spares are how I want them to be. The crew down here is awesome. There’s nothing I would change. Whatever happens now is going to happen. I can’t do much but go along for the ride now.A very good thing I have in my corner is a ton of awesome people. From Jonah Street sitting next to me doing road book work to the whole Pit Crew in the truck I feel like I have the best group in the world to lean on.As an American here in the Dakar Rally pits I have to comment on the scale of the race. The sheer investment in support and logistics is completely off-the-hook compared to anything you’d ever see in Baja or Nevada or at any National race in America. There are more bitchin’ cool six-wheel-drive support trucks here than you can possibly imagine. You’d never see this in North America.As a first-time rider coming into this environment of over-the-top support there’s a feeling of, “Holy Sh*#! This is a big deal. Do I belong here? Do I know what I’m doing enough to deserve to take part in this sort of race?” So questions really start coming up inside your head. The first question is, “Do I belong here?” The second question is, “Am I nearly tough enough to finish?”The first answer to that is going to come tomorrow when I start with some pretty fast guys. I’m curious if the pace I’m committed to riding is relevant to the challenge ahead.January 1st, 2012: Dakar Stage 1
Today was a pretty uneventful day to start the Rally, which is good I think. We rode something like 800 km’s of pavement and I think there was a 400 km straight that we rode where there wasn’t even a single dent or wiggle in the road—it was perfectly straight. So it was pretty boring for a while.The special test itself was pretty cool with not a lot to it. It was short and I barely got myself warmed up before it was over. I’m not too worried about my result as I didn’t feel like I had anything going super wrong and I don’t feel like I was very heroic either so I’m sure it was good enough and that’s what the hope was.The Bivoauc is absolutely off-the-hook, again. The amount of support and money and crazy sh*# everywhere here is completely crazy and the scale of it is awesome.The Rally Pan Am pit crew is dialed in—they got the best spot, in my opinion, in the entire camp. They’re set up under a couple trees and we had nice shade in the afternoon when I got here.I rolled into camp a little after 5 p.m. and man, time flies. I got here and got out of my riding gear, had a quick drink to get some electrolytes in, started working on the road book, got Tim Morton (Baja Bound owner and my mechanic for the race) lined up on the bike and before you know it I had a little bit of food and continued to work on my road book and its all-of-a-suddenly 9 o’clock.I couldn’t ask for more

• No Related Posts