Jonah finished 1st place in Stage 5 today and gained 16 minutes on Coma who is still leading overall.

Short interview from Eurosport which also has the sad news on Pascal Terry:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/rallyraidio/09D18.mp3

Jonah Street:




Marc Coma:

 

Once again I think it's stupid to run the slow motorcycles with the cars or trucks. Did you see the one bike get ran over by the car, kinda funny he was probably thinking get that hunk of **** out of the way.. LOL

Why they don't race the bikes a day later is beyond me, instead of the same time. It should go from fastest to slowest. Cars, trucks, motorcycles ,atv's.. Sure seems like it would save a life or at the least some injuries.

 

Not as good a day for Street, today - he came in 11th in the stage, and lost the 15 minutes to Coma that he gained yesterday, though Street is still in 2nd overall with a 7 minute lead of over 3rd.

Beardoge, it is part of what makes the Dakar the Dakar, to change it would make it something else and it would no longer be the Dakar. The organizers have been doing this event for 30 years, I think they know a few things about how to do it. Do you follow the Baja 1000? There you have trucks and bikes and everything in between on the course at the same time with far less in the way of warning systems.

You might be new to the Dakar event. To race a day later would give prior course knowledge to the bikes or whoever raced later. Navigation skills are a huge part of this race. The course is not marked, they navigate by using a road book, measuring distance, taking the directional headings that the road book indicates at the right times and distance, etc. If one class raced a day later, they would not have to navigate as they would already know the course from the prior day's race and that would take away a major challenge of this race. In past years, the winners and losers are largely differentiated by who makes the fewest navigational errors.

 

Stage 5 vid summary (yesterday):

http://player.sbs.com.au/dakar/#/dak...Stage-5-Bikes/


Stage 6 summary (today):

http://player.sbs.com.au/dakar/#/dak...Stage-6-Bikes/

 

Here's a good shot of the road book that the riders navigate by:



Road book in the middle, basicaly a long roll of directions with distance from the previous entry, compass heading, any turns, dangerous areas like wash-outs are marked too.



It is interesting, the bikes are equipped with GPS, but the GPS only becomes active when the rider gets within a km or so of one of the route waypoints. At that point, the rider can use their on-board compass and the waypoint location to navigate to it. But being that the stages themselves are usually 300 - 500 km long, there's a lot of distance that you can go wrong and get off course in that amount of area, and the GPS will not activate unless it gets within range of the waypoint, so you could wander around quite a while if you are off course trying pick up the waypoint. Once the GPS activates, they have to navigate to within 200 meters of the actual waypoint, at which point the GPS screen will acknowledge that the waypoint has been reached, and they can continue on to the next one.

Apparently a rider today or yesterday missed a waypoint by only 60 meters outside the 200 meter range and was docked a hefty time penalty.

If you miss something like 5 waypoints in a row, you are disqualified. That happened to the leader in the "car" category today. Apparently they BMW was having engine overheating problems so they tried to skirt the sand dunes to avoid a mechanical failure. But it cost them the race, they are out, disqualified for cutting too much of the course.

Apparently Jonah's lost time today was due mainly to a navigational problem when he got confused about which way to go.

This is an awesome race, lots of high drama stuff. One rider yesterday had his clutch fail about 60 km from the finish. He was able to arrange a ride back to the bivouac - on horseback! - to get parts, then back into the desert at night to try and find the bike and fix it. He eventually found and fixed the bike, but then after cresting only 3 more dunes, his engine died. He pulled the head right there in the desert to find that after the desert had cooled down so much with the cold air and cold engine it was running so lean it burned a hole in his piston. He then found a local to tow him by straps for 70 km along dirt tracks by his footpegs back to camp. Took all night. Listen to his account here:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/rallyraidio/09D21.mp3

Good stuff!

 

Excellent call-in from Jonah after todays stage, stage 7:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/rallyraidio/09D23.mp3

 

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200...kar_rally.html

 

I think your boy Street is out!!!!!! He doesn't seem to be listed anymore! Abandoned due to a wrist injury!

http://www.dakar.com/2009/DAK/LIVE/u...ement/CEM.html

 

watchin the recap right now. J. Street definately hurt his wrist. Don't Know if he's out of race, i missed the end of report.

 

Confirmed. Street withdrawn. His wrist injury must ahve been bad. Sorry to here he's out, top privateer. Is he the last USA rider out?

We lost BARRIERE VARJU (AUS) to the dunes too. Still got two Aussies on the case though.

BTW did anyone check the dune sets at the end of stage 9. That's some serious s#%t right there.