Deep in the Dust: On the Dakar trail

For the Coconut Resort Race team, the last two days have been hellish, returning from stage five just four hours before embarking on stage six - a stage which then took them until 1AM the following day to finish.

Running into the rest day with two mammoth days, and a massive amount of repair, maintenance and modification work to be done on their car, I was surprised to see Geoff up and about in the bivouac this morning, expecting him to sleep in on the rest day, particularly as today is Olholm’s birthday.

“We made it in!” he explained when he saw me this morning. “We were lucky to get through. The day before yesterday, the wheel fell off!

"Basically the bracket holding the A-arm snapped, so we couldn’t fix that, and the other a-arm was all snapped. Because it broke the a-arm it broke the drive shaft, so Steve fixed that, and we waited five hours for the truck to come with the welder on it so we could weld the bracket back on and we welded it up.

“That was about six or seven at night, then we had a good run to the dunes but then the turbo blew,” Olholm explained, adding that Riley had to work without experience to solve the problem.

“So Steve had to change the turbo, which he’d never done, and he did a fantastic job there, and that was midnight, and everyone was camped there - a truck in front of us rolled over while we were there, so there were 20 people camped and we decided we needed to get in.

“We got every way point, the guy at the gate couldn’t believe because cars couldn’t do it, but we got every one.

“We had to get in because the guys had to do work on the car. Yesterday we had a good run because we took it steady, but today the guys will put a new turbo on it because it’s a second hand turbo there, and we’ve got a huge couple of days ahead."

Olholm then compared the Dakar to the Australian Safari, saying that there is no comparison between the two events.

“That course yesterday was rougher than seven days of Safari, that course yesterday, no Safari car would finish,” he said.

Still, Olholm says that some of the things Australians take for granted on the Safari - like vents in the bash plate to prevent sand building up - don’t come standard on his UK built x-raid.

“There are so many things that are standard practice in Australia, with how we build the cars that they just haven’t done here,” he said. “But that’s OK, we’ll fix it up a bit as we go along.”

Not only did Riley do a turbo change, change a tyre just one kilometre from home and weld the a-bar back onto the car, when the truck arrived with the welder, there was no welding mask, so the innovative bush mechanic simply donned three pairs of sun glasses to do the job.

Riley says he saw three trucks rolled, one while the duo waited, “He was trying to back down the dune and he just went over,” Riley explained. “It made such a loud thud.

“We were just going past rolled over 18 tonne trucks, cars, bikes, the lot, it was insane!”

Riley says there is nothing like the Dakar, with the most surreal moment occurring when the Russian team decided to camp where they were for the night: “They just pulled up, got out the ghetto blaster and cranked up the music,” he laughed.

“It filled the whole valley with songs like ‘Take a walk on the wild side’, and it was big valley, but it was so loud you had to put your fingers in your ears.”

With 50 per-cent of the rally now behind them, the Coconut Crew have got some maintenance and mods to do before the next marathon stage of the rally. Including, drilling holes in the bash plates to allow sand to escape and strengthening the a-arms and chassis.

I had to ask Geoff if he’d considered giving up at any stage during the last couple of days, “Nope,” he replied. “Never say die.”

The next stage is a monster 660km of racing from Arica down to Antofagasta.