JUSTIN HYNES on the 'glorious madness' involved in motorsports toughest race - the Paris-Dakar rally
'I achieved one of my life's dreams when I climbed Everest, but the Dakar is much tougher, tougher than Le Mans and Formula One. For me, it's the toughest race in the world."
So said former F1 driver and amateur mountaineer Ukyo Katayama on the eve of his second Dakar Rally attempt. Measured against those endeavours you begin to understand something about Dakar. About the demands it puts on drivers, on teams. About the dangers.
The toughest race in the world has its origins in the imagination of Frenchman Thierry Sabine. In 1977, Sabine, contesting the Abidjan-Nice rally, got lost in the Libyan desert.
Eventually rescued he returned home with one aim - to bring everyone to the desert for a greater rally, the ultimate. The following year the first Paris-Dakar was staged.
This year the rally doesn't reach Dakar in Senegal but the challenge is no less stern. Beginning on January 1st in Marseilles, the event headed to Valencia in Spain, followed by a boat ride to Tunis.
Thereafter it was more than two weeks through some of the harshest territory on the planet. In all, 8,522km from France to Tunis, south through the desert to the Algerian border, before blasting north-east across the Sahara to Egypt and finally to the Red Sea and the finish, at Sharm El Sheikh.
In the midst of this are the drivers, 342 of them and the teams - Mitsubishi, the current masters, KTM for motorcycles, and this year, for the first time - Nissan.
And at the helm of the Nissan Rally Raid project is an Irishman. Alec Poole's name will not be unfamiliar to Irish rally fans. The Blackrock man has an illustrious career dating back to the 1960s but it hasn't truly prepared him for Dakar.
As Nissan's head of motorsport in Europe, Poole, speaking on day six, marvells at the demands it places on his drivers - Japan's Kenjiro Shinzuka and South African Geniel De Villiers - his mechanics and on the fleet of support vehicles.
"The hardest thing is turning around the amount of people we have involved. We have five trucks and we have to move 40 people and all the equipment through the desert each day. It's not easy."
He isn't overstating the fact. While F1 relaxes in plush hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants, Dakar is down and dirty.
"When a stage is done and the bivouac is set up - a couple of tarps in the sand - we'll have a quick debrief and then get to work on the following day, go through whatever problems we're having," he says.
"The way it works is that the drivers start later than the rest. The support vehicles make their way to the next bivouac to be ready for when the drivers arrive. It sounds grim and there is a lot of sand, but as long as we have the odd bottle of wine in the evening it's okay."
If it's rough on support teams, it's doubly so on drivers. For the bulk of the rally the drivers are out of contact with their teams. Radio links to the vehicles are not permitted and often the only contact is through the emergency beacons each vehicle is equipped with in case of accident.
For two stages of the rally the drivers must navigate without the aid of GPS. "It's pretty formidable," Poole admits. "Often the only way we have of keeping track of the drivers is via the Internet! We have two trucks entered as competitors and we use them as 'sweepers' for the others, keeping a watch.
"When the drivers get to the bivouac, it's our only chance to find out what's really going on. And if there's a problem with the vehicles then it's a rough and ready solution."
The fun for Nissan continues on to Ghat in the south of Tunisia. But during the following stage to Ghadames disaster strikes. Shinozuka hits a massive dune, sending his vehicle into a looping series of rolls. When the emergency services arrive both he and French co-driver Thierry Delli-Zotti are in a serious condition.
Shinozuka has severe facial trauma as well as abdominal injuries. Delli-Zotti has broken both legs. They are airlifted to hospital in Tunis where for two days the Japanese is listed as critical before beginning to make a slow, painful recovery.
It's the start of a chain of accidents in the rally. Within days, Bruno Cauvy, co-driver of car 280, is killed on the stage between Zilla to Sarir. It is the rally's first fatality since 1997. Then crossing the border between Libya and Egypt, a KTM support truck is wrecked. It hit a landmine, which blows off a rear wheel.
That is the reality of the Dakar. It offers impossible to match rewards for the finishers. But only if the end is reached.
Over thousands of kilometres of desert, anything can happen. In the past 25 years, drivers have been killed, injured, lost, abducted and suffered banditry all in pursuit of one of motorsports most elusive prizes. In traversing some of the world's poorest lands, its worth may be questionable but the bravery of drivers like Katayama, Shinozuka and Cauvy can't be doubted. The race may have its origins in the wandering mind of a lost French rally driver but there remains in it some kind of glorious madness.