Road Warrior

January 4, 1988--Hassi-Messaoud, Algeria

Not for nothing has this Paristo-Dakar rally acquired an unrivaled reputation as the most miserable piece of work an off-road racer will ever see. People die in this thing. And don't let anyone tell you the course is 8000 miles. It may be 8000 miles on the rally map or in the official route book, but when you're out here for real on this endless expanse of boulders and sand dunes and dry lakes, zigzagging through Algeria and Niger and Mali and Mauritania and Senegal, screaming helter-skelter through the Sahara Desert at 120 miles an hour, the mileage mounts with every wrong turn and miscalculation. And God knows, there are plenty of those. This is only day four of 22, but already I feel as though I've seen more of Africa's sand than Rommel did.

The media in Europe, and especially in France, where the Paris--Dakar rally is regarded with no less reverence and awe than the Super Bowl is in the U.S., think Americans are too soft for this sort of endeavor. Fortunately, Camel Racing Service and Range Rover's people don't feel that way, so they hired me to drive one of the four cars that make up the Camel Range Rover team. Still, the European pundits don't expect me to do well, even though I've had the good fortune to win more than my share of grueling desert races, including the Baja 1000, off-road racing's version of the Indy 500. In fact, I've managed to win the Baja 1000 six times--three times on a motorcycle, three in a car. I've won the Baja 500 four times, the Mint 400 twice, the Roof of Africa Rally twice, and just nine months ago, I captured the Rallye L' Atlas in Morocco. But as the lone American in the 1988 Paris--Dakar, I'm regarded as nothing more than a rookie with fancy credentials. I don't mind. I'd rather be underestimated than overrated. I just want to do well. A top-five finish would be nice.

Along with my navigator, Alain Fieuw of Belgium, I was sitting ninth among the race's 420 cars and trucks at this morning's start. As usual, the rally's motorcycle division, 183 strong this year, started ahead of us. The 155-mile racing section of today's stage traversed intricate sand-dune valleys and canyons. Lots of tight twists and turns, very technical stuff. Creep along in low gear at ten miles per hour, hard turn, then 30 miles per hour, another hard turn--that sort of thing. Without having to work too hard, I managed to work my way past five cars and was running third when two motorcycles in front of me, vying for the same narrow passage between two dunes, bumped each other and went down in a heap. I swerved to avoid them and, for my trouble, ended up planted atop a dune, my rear wheels spinning in place and spewing geysers of sand, my front wheels cantilevered over the edge of the dune's sharp drop-off. Welcome to Paris--Dakar.

The motorcyclists got up right away. Since I'd spared them the indignity of riding out the race enmeshed in my front grille, I thought they might come over and give me a little shove to get me going again. No chance. They hopped onto their bikes and took off. Can't say I blame them. After all, they're in a race, too.

Alain and I weren't exactly happy about being stuck, but we were prepared for the eventuality, thanks to the mechanics at Halt'Up!, the French company that assembled and prepped Camel Range Rover's cars. A conventional jack is useless in much of the soft African sand, so Halt'Up! had given us a device I had never seen before, a large canvas air bladder that lifts the car as it inflates when you attach it to the exhaust pipe and rev the car's engine. Inasmuch as I have managed to race in the desert for more than 20 years without benefit of one of these heavy, cumbersome things, I was tempted to pitch it in Paris when I was packing our already-overloaded car. I'm glad I didn't.

Sprawled on either side of the Range Rover, Alain and I dug with treasure-seeking ferocity, while below us, competitors zoomed past, wondering, perhaps, why some idiot would attempt to drive over this dune when there was a perfectly good route around it. While the rear wheels were held aloft by the jack, we jammed six-foot-long fiberglass boards--common accessories in this race--under them for traction. My job was to rev the motor, pop the clutch and hope six feet was enough for take-off. As usual, Alain's responsibilities were more demanding and less glamorous. He was to gather everything up and chase the car until I found a hard spot in the sand or a downhill where I could stop without getting stuck.

Within 30 minutes, we were on our way. Within 20 miles, we were lost.

The route book indicated a right turn at a specified kilometer. What we had failed to consider, distracted as we were by our earlier misfortune and all the ground we had lost, was that while stuck on the dune, we had spun our wheels enough to throw off our odometer reading. No longer in sync with the route book, we took a right turn at the wrong place and drove 16 miles out of our way, squandering 20 minutes.

Our mishaps notwithstanding, by day's end, we dropped only five places. Fourteenth overall, 42 minutes off the pace. It could have been worse: One hundred and thirty-nine drivers, more than a fifth of the field, had their rally hopes prematurely dashed today. Some made it to the finish too late and were disqualified; others had mechanical problems or got stuck in the sand or had accidents and were injured. Among the scratches was one of my Camel Range Rover teammates, Salvador Canellas of Spain, whose car had suddenly and inexplicably quit on him.

So we are three now. My other teammates, Frenchmen Patrick Zaniroli and Patrick Tambay, are running third and fourth, respectively. Tambay is a Formula I racing hero in France, so well known there that he can't walk down a street or sit in a restaurant without being gawked at and pestered. I suppose his good looks don't hurt in that regard. He's quite friendly, willing to share whatever he knows about this race with me, though this is only his second go at it.

Zaniroli, by contrast, is taciturn and unhelpful. Not unpleasant, just unhelpful. This is his ninth Paris--Dakar--he missed only the first one--so he knows more about this race than the rest of us put together, but what he knows, he keeps to himself. I thought perhaps he wasn't confiding in me because of the language barrier. I asked Tambay if Zaniroli shared his expertise with him. "No," he said, "he doesn't tell me anything."

I get the feeling that Zaniroli is as intent on beating us as he is on beating anyone else. He won this race in 1985 and he has finished second three times. I sure would love to know what he knows.

January Fifth--Bordj Omar Driss, Algeria

It strikes me as the height of irony that in a race that regrettably has earned a reputation for death and injury, a race stage would be canceled due to unsafe conditions. Unsafe conditions? This entire race is an unsafe condition. Nevertheless, because of road-maintenance excavations on the dusty oil-pipeline route we were to have followed today to the village of Bordj Omar Driss, the stage was downgraded to what the French call a liaison, a nonracing transit to get the cars safely from one place to another, usually to avoid endangering bystanders in populated areas. The first three days of the rally were liaisons, taking us from Paris to the southern coast of France, across the Mediterranean to Africa by ferry and into the open desert.

But even the liaisons can be dangerous. Two nights ago, while sailing along at 90 miles per hour on an open highway on the approach to El Oued, I narrowly avoided plowing into a herd of camels crossing the road. The reporters would have had a ball with that one: "Camel Car Demolished by Camels." On today's liaison, Jacky Ickx of Belgium and Formula I racing fame took a sharp turn too fast and rolled his car. He complained tonight that the route book should have warned us about the turn, but I noticed nobody else had rolled there.

If liaisons are meant to be easy, the race segments are meant to be tough. Especially yesterday's. The organizers figure they may as well weed out the weak cars and the weak drivers before they get too far into the heart of darkness.

January Sixth--Tamanrasset, Algeria

Another 114 drivers bowed out during today's cruel but incredibly beautiful 496-mile race, the sixth and longest stage of the rally. Alain and I placed a respectable tenth for the day, and we've moved up to eighth in accumulated time. But by the time we rolled into this desert oasis, I was ready to go home. And I probably would have if there had been a flight out of here.

The problem came near the end, after we'd spent nearly 14 hours winding through rocky passes in the Ahaggar Mountains and through spectacular sand dunes. We're talking 2000-foothigh dunes, maybe higher, with descents of about a 40 percent grade. You could never, ever think about going back up them. And if you were going fast and got cockeyed, you could easily roll over.

This was my kind of terrain. I felt confident, drove well and managed to pass everyone except former World Rally champion Ari Vatanen of Finland, the race leader and last year's winner. It probably didn't hurt that I got lost once and undoubtedly cut off a little part of the course, which is legal as long as you don't miss a check point. The race is rerouted somewhat every year--this year, it's about 85 percent new--but Alain has ridden a motorcycle in six Paris--Dakars and he knows this section. His French accent rose above the whine (continued on page 161)Road Warrior(continued from page 142) of the Range Rover's noisy transmission and reached me through my intercom headset. "I can't find the course right now," he said without apology, "but if you just head along that mountain range over there, we'll run into it." Bull's-eye. I wish it were always that easy.

Eventually, we found ourselves on a dry lake bed, flat as Formica and utterly featureless. We cruised at 120 miles per hour on the compass reading specified in the route book, but it soon became apparent that we were off course. The finish-line check point wasn't where it was supposed to be. "I don't know where it is!" Alain shouted after double-checking the route book. He seemed certain that he wasn't in error, but I wasn't so sure. He was insistent: "They show it as being here and it should be here! The book is wrong!"

By then it was dark and we were darting around the dry lake like aimless idiots, three kilometers this way, five that way. I was steamed. Here I had moved up to second place in the rough section, and we were blowing it on terrain that should have been a cakewalk. "This is a goddamn French Easter-egg hunt!" I wailed. "This is stupid! They call this a race, but all we do is wander around the desert looking for check points."

Out of desperation, we finally resumed the specified compass heading and hurtled through the Algerian night like fugitives. Twenty kilometers down course, we saw the blinking blue light. The organizers had moved the check point without bothering to change the route book, an oversight that didn't seem to faze some drivers but cost us a half hour. I was inconsolable.

"Well," Alain reasoned, "this is Paris--Dakar. These things happen. Later on, somebody else will have trouble, and you won't, and you'll make that back."

To make matters worse, our team lost one of its three support trucks today because it couldn't get through one of the narrow mountain passes. Support trucks hauling spare parts are utilized by all the big-money teams, but the rules require them to follow the race route. So it's a race for them, too: If they don't arrive at each night's camp early enough to supply their team mechanics with parts, they're not doing anybody any good.

Something like 30 percent of all the support trucks were knocked out today for the same reason ours was. We undoubtedly would have lost all three of ours if Zaniroli, who remembered the Ahaggar passes from a previous year, hadn't warned Pascal Vigneron, Halt'Up! owner and team manager. Vigneron rerouted two of the trucks; they missed a check point and were assessed a three-hour penalty, which means that tomorrow they'll have to start farther back in the field, behind slower trucks. But at least they are still in the hunt. Lose those trucks and our entire team may as well fold up its tents and go home.

To be sure, no one has it easy in this race, but the support-truck drivers probably have the worst grind of all. The mechanics are flown from camp to camp by the Halt'Up! team, but the support-truck drivers have to slog it out on the ground, well behind the race cars.

Here's how our team works it: When Zaniroli, Tambay and I arrive at each night's destination, we wake up our mechanics and they take the Range Rovers apart with tools we carry in our cars. Then we all have dinner and go to bed. Later in the night, the support trucks finally roll in and the team manager wakes up the mechanics again. They work on the cars through the night, while the truck drivers grab some sleep, and then we do it all again the next day. Since the truck drivers never stay anywhere long enough to get decent sleep, three drivers are assigned to each truck. While they're on the move, which is most of the time, they take turns sleeping. The idea is to make sure no one takes his turn sleeping while he's driving.

January Seventh--Djanet, Algeria

I was doing 70 in a dry wash when suddenly, I heard a blast from a horn right behind me. I couldn't see anything behind me, because the little aerodynamic side mirrors are worthless and the rear window is always covered with dust. The side windows are always covered with dust, too, so my field of vision is limited to the 90-degree view the front windshield affords. If I want to see behind me--to look for a navigational landmark we may have missed, for instance--I have to do 360s.

I assumed the horn behind me belonged to one of the Peugeots. Peugeot has reportedly invested $10,000,000 in this race, far more money than any other sponsor, and its cars are, without question, the best and fastest on the course. During the first racing stage, I passed every car ahead of me but one and thought I was going fairly fast. All of a sudden, Ari Vatanen's Peugeot 405 whooshed past me so fast, I felt as if I were driving a golf cart. Vatanen hit a dune and was airborne for a moment; as soon as I saw his car land smoothly and easily, I knew our cars weren't competitive with his.

Which is ironic, because these Range Rovers aren't exactly cardboard-and-glue jobs. The custom Kevlar/carbonfiber bodies house a 300-horsepower, V8 engine that can take the car from 0 to 60 in less than five seconds or cruise her at 130. The navigational instrumentation includes digital-readout compasses and odometers that we calibrate with onboard microcomputers. Range Rover and Camel spent $250,000 on each vehicle.

I pulled over to let the Peugeot pass and was startled when I was passed instead by a huge DAF truck--a race entry, not a support truck--belching black smoke from its skyward exhaust pipes, all four tires spinning viciously and spitting gravel in every direction. This ten-ton monstrosity resembles a garbage truck; it must be ten feet high and twice as long. Absolutely shocked that this thing had overtaken me, I decided to just hang back and watch for a while. What a sight! It was straddling boulders I had to dodge. It was mowing down bushes and small trees. On straightaways, it pulled away from me, packing 1200 horsepower in twin engines.

In a sandy wash, after tailing the DAF truck for about 100 miles, I tried to pass it and hit a boulder obscured by the dust. Flat tire, broken shocks and springs. Alain and I hastily did some creative repairs and limped the rest of the way in. We were 23rd for the 328-mile stage but still managed to climb from eighth to seventh in the over-all standings. Thirteen motorcycles, 19 cars and ten trucks gave up the chase today.

To our team's profound disappointment and dismay, Zaniroli, who was running third overall, was among them. I encountered him near the end of today's race stranded atop a dune. Blown engine. It was a bizarre scene up there. Zaniroli was very upset, of course, but his navigator, Igo Fenouil, had stripped to his black bikini underwear and was merrily doing cartwheels in the sand. I don't know how those two ever got teamed. Zaniroli is so serious, Fenouil so wacky. I don't think they were hitting it off all that well, and they still had two weeks to go. No wonder Fenouil was doing cartwheels.

January Eighth--Djado, Niger

For some reason, the medical cars weren't in position today, so the organizers decided to change the 460-mile race to a liaison stage.

That was only slightly more surprising than the shock that awaited Alain when (continued on page 204)Road Warrior(continued from page 161) he woke up this morning. As usual, we slept on the ground in the compound where our cars were required to remain overnight. Our heads were adjacent to a chain-link fence, and our cars and mechanics were no more than 25 feet away. Yet Alain's duffel bag, which he had placed under his head for safekeeping, was nowhere to be found. In the middle of the night, someone had actually lifted his head, substituted the duffel with a jacket and set his head down.

Theft in our overnight camps is not unusual. A few nights ago, several motorcycle riders lost their helmets and boots. A lot of racers prudently threw their wallets to the bottom of their sleeping bags, only to lose them to thieves who boldly cut the bags at the foot and reached in.

It's amazing that anyone in our camps sleeps long enough or soundly enough to get ripped off. Mechanics are usually working through the night, so there's the constant clanging of parts and tools, the revving of engines, the incessant drone of generators. And there's no escaping the glare of floodlights. Even if things quiet down a bit, it's just a matter of time before another support truck rumbles into the compound.

January Ninth--Arlit, Niger

I have just survived a day in which I easily could have been killed. It left one racer dead and another paralyzed. Three or four motorcyclists broke their legs.

I've been out in the wilderness all over--snowmobiling in Colorado, biking, racing cars in Mexico--and I've never had the sort of eerie feeling I experienced today in Niger's Ténéré Desert. I think it was the first time I'd ever been truly fearful. Oh, I've been scared for an instant before, but today's fear was constant. When I started racing motorcycles in the Sixties, the thing that scared me the most was not the fear of injury but the fear of failure. I faced those same apprehensions going into this race, too, but at the age of 46, I sense my mortality more than I used to--I have more of a sense of my limitations. And I have a wife and four kids to think about. So now I also fear injury. Not so much a broken leg or arm; those I could recover from. But a head or spinal injury really scares me. I stopped racing motorcycles seriously years ago because of that. I'd seen too many people paralyzed or brain-damaged.

The problem today was depth perception. Or any other sort of perception, for that matter. I drove 370 miles before I saw anything. There were no people, no wells, no trees, no bushes, no roads, no signposts, no fences, no abandoned cars, no dilapidated shacks--nothing. There wasn't even a horizon. The Ténéré is a surrealistic place where the eye can't distinguish between the white sand and the white sky. I couldn't tell if the terrain in front of me was uphill or downhill, smooth or rugged. It was like driving in a thick fog. I couldn't see the bumps; I'd just feel the car jump. At 120 miles an hour, that's a rather unsettling sensation. I slowed to 80. We shouldn't be doing this, I told myself. This is stupid. Yet I didn't sense that Alain was uncomfortable in the least. He just kept one eye on the route book, the other on the digital compass and calmly called out his conclusions: a little more right, a little more left, still more left. We sailed across the dunes like a cloudship.

Suddenly, we were airborne. We probably flew for only two or three seconds, but it seemed like a month and a half to me, because I had no idea what sort of surface or gradient we were going to land on. Uphill? Downhill? A gaping hole? Anything too radical could easily result in a flip or a roll, which, given our speed, could have had unspeakable consequences.

The answer came gently and was lifegiving: a smooth landing, the downhill glide of the car conforming nearly perfectly to the downhill glide of the car conforming nearly perfectly to the downslope of the dune that received us.

Enough. I cut our speed way down and made a 90-degree turn to the north, hoping to find someone else's tracks to follow. When it's all solid white out there and there are no tracks, the whiteout is intensified. But as soon as there are tracks to concentrate on, you can kind of tell whether the terrain is going up or down or whatever's happening with it.

Alain wasn't happy with my decision. "It's gonna cost us too much time," he said. It didn't seem to occur to him that a little too much recklessness in this dune field could cost a man all his time.

Presently, we came upon some fresh tracks. I altered our course to follow them.

Car tracks in sand tell me what's happening ahead. When the car ahead slows down or brakes suddenly, the tracks widen, because the vehicle is no longer planing on the surface.

The tracks guided me for about 60 miles and then suddenly widened. I slammed on my brakes. The Range Rover's tires bit into the sand and we skidded to the brink of a plummet, a sharp dune drop-off of 30 or 40 feet. At the bottom lay a Mitsubishi--or what was left of one--that obviously had descended the grade in violent fashion. Fiberglass sections were strewn everywhere. In contrast to their car, the driver and his navigator appeared to be all right, so I kept moving to avoid getting stuck.

In Arlit tonight, we learned that one of those monster DAF trucks had flipped over and ejected the navigator through the windshield with his seat and seat belt still strapped to him. DAF management's response to its colleague's death was to pull its other entries from the race. Sudden, unexpected death always brings with it a flash of perspective. For now, spending all this money so we can tear across the sand dunes in these expensive cars seems absurd.

January 11--Agadez, Niger

A layover day among the Taureg tribes-people in this distinctly African city, whose mostly dirt streets wind among mud-and-stone structures and whose black denizens are robed and ornamented in silver jewelry. Agadez embraces the rally with open arms. I'm told that half of the city's annual income is derived from the rally's brief stop, which makes me wonder what the place is like the 363 other days of the year.

We have gone nearly 4000 miles--halfway--since New Year's Day, hence the scheduled day of much-needed rest. A swirl of press and TV crews has flown in from France. I'm running seventh overall. Most of the reporters tell me they are surprised to see that I'm still running at all.

January 12--Niamey, Niger

Our team is staying in a hotel in this cosmopolitan city on the Niger River, and I've just enjoyed the pleasure of a hot shower, only my second during these 12 days of Mad Hatter scurrying. I continue to hold on to seventh place overall. My sole remaining teammate, Patrick Tambay, is sitting 12th, about two hours behind me in cumulative time. Inasmuch as I'm five hours and 48 minutes behind Vatanen, who is still wearing everyone out with his pace-setting Peugeot, my competitive gaze is quite naturally shifting to the factory-Mitsubishi team. The Peugeots are really out of our league, but the Mitsubishi team is quite comparable to ours, by any measure--drivers, cars, monetary investment, preparation. Vatanen's Peugeot teammate, Finnish countryman and World Rally champion Juha Kankkunen, is in second, an hour behind Vatanen, but the four other cars ahead of me are Mitsubishis. I don't have much of a chance of catching the Peugeots, unless they have serious mechanical or navigational problems, but at least two of the Mitsubishis are within my reach. Plus, I'd like to crack the top five.

January 14--Tessalit, Mali

One of the difficulties of this race is the unusual character of the Sahara sand. It's soft and fine-grained, almost like talcum powder in some places. You'll be driving along in fairly hard stuff, and suddenly, you'll hit a pocket of powder and the car will just stop and bury itself. You never want to stop intentionally, because you may not be able to get going again. At check points, instead of stopping, drivers gear down and just keep rolling. The navigator holds the daily timecard out for the checkpoint official, who runs alongside and tries to stamp it. If he misses, you have to circle around and make another pass. A lot of times, there'll be three or four cars circling, and another two or three stuck.

Another of this race's formidable difficulties is finding your way. The organizers make it difficult on purpose, but I think they went a little bit overboard today. First, they had us searching for a nonexistent check point near the Algerian border. Then the route book advised us to take the second road to the right as we passed through a remote village, when, in fact, we should have taken the third road to the right. The guy who made the route-book instructions either had a perverse sense of humor or spent hours lost in the Sahara and perhaps never made it to Dakar. He'd better not be in Dakar when this race ends, because I know a lot of navigators and drivers who would like to get their hands on him. Tambay, for one, who ended up in the wrong country today and eventually hired a camel herdsman to sit on his navigator's lap and guide him back to Mali.

Navigating in this race isn't easy. We're flying along, bumping and turning sharply, and poor Alain is trying to look at the route book, look at the odometer, look at the compass and communicate instructions to me. It's not an enviable job, tougher than the driving, I think, because the driving comes by instinct.

One of the Mitsubishis was lost for more than three hours today, so even though Alain and I were lost for more than an hour ourselves, we managed to move up to sixth place.

January 15--Gara Jakania, Mali

Earlier in the race, after hearing me grumble about lousy directions in the route book, Jacky Ickx, the Belgian driver, said to me in a very stern tone, "If everyone got lost, you could blame the route book. If only some of you got lost, it was your own fault." That makes sense. On the other hand, once a few front runners take the wrong line, it screws up the entire race, because everybody follows them. If the route book says to take the left fork but all the tracks seem to indicate that just about everyone ahead of you has opted for the right fork, it's damn hard to ignore the tracks. Especially when the route book has been such an unfaithful guide. All the Paris--Dakar veterans are saying that the route book is usually vastly superior to the one we've been saddled with this year.

That wasn't much consolation to Alain and me during today's 433-mile race, as we caromed around the futile end of a box canyon after arguing about which way to go at one of those forks. It was consoling, however, to note that virtually all of the other leaders except Tambay were bottled up in the same canyon, swarming around like angry honeybees. Vatanen and Kankkunen had topographic maps spread out on the hoods of their Peugeots and were hunched over them like confused vacationers, a summit meeting that quickly drew a crowd and sparked debates in three languages. The canyon seemed to offer no escape except via the route by which we had entered. Alain and I headed back toward the spot 20 miles distant where we had taken the wrong turn. We were not happy campers.

Managing to stay clear of the box-canyon debacle, Tambay beat the field by almost an hour and catapulted from 12th place to sixth, while I fell two places to eighth. Vatanen and Kankkunen are still one-two, even though they, like me, squandered two and a half hours today.

January 16--Timbuktu, Mali

The organizers arranged for locals from Timbuktu to truck gas up to us in the desolation of Gara Jakania last night. The organizers did not, however, arrange for the locals to charge us a reasonable price. The option was pay or stay. We paid $1200 to fill our car, a modest $18 per gallon.

Here in Timbuktu, Alain introduced me to a Belgian friend of his who had raced Paris--Dakar two or three times on a motorcycle. A couple of years ago, his motorcycle broke down here. He met a black woman, fell in love, married and is now raising a family here.

January 17--Bamako, Mali

Tambay won the 234-mile race out of Timbuktu--he has now won two of the past three stages--and I was third, so it was a good day for Camel Range Rover. Andrew Cowan, who has probably won more long-distance off-road races than anyone else in the world and was fifth overall entering today's stage, blew the engine on his Mitsubishi. I've enjoyed the affable Scotsman's humor and hate to see him go, but at least there's now one less Mitsubishi Tambay and I have to contend with. We're sitting fourth and fifth, respectively, with only the Peugeots and one Mitsubishi ahead of us.

January 18--Kayes, Mali

Somebody strolled into the car compound just before dawn today and drove off in Vatanen's Peugeot 405. Somebody drives off in his Peugeot 405 every morning, but usually, it's Vatanen. This time, it was someone with a business proposition, conveyed by phone, for Peugeot team manager Jean Todt: If Todt wished to reclaim his front runner's car, he should start raising capital, because it would cost him 500,000 French francs--almost 100,000 U.S. dollars. Todt assumed he was the victim of a joke until he checked the compound and found daylight where Vatanen's car used to be. The Peugeot manager had prepared himself for a variety of problems in the Paris--Dakar, but this wasn't one.

As it happened, Todt's immediate problem was short-lived. It seems that the thief was ignorant in the ways of race cars and didn't know how to open the main fuel-tank feeds. The car was soon found not far from where it had been stolen.

Now the Peugeot team has another problem, and no small one at that. By the time the missing car was located and recovered, Vatanen had missed his start time for today's race to Kayes, 316 miles of narrow, winding roads, ruts, washouts, river fordings and dense jungle vegetation--a thoroughly delightful little motor tour of western Mali. The organizers allowed him to race the stage late and, for now, he is still the event leader, but apparently, the Peugeot driver may be disqualified. I, for one, would hate to see a participant who has held the over-all lead in this rally the entire way--all 15 days since the opening racing section in Algeria--disqualified because someone stole his car. The word here is that the Paris--Dakar organizers want to let Vatanen continue, but, as the European press speculated, FISA (Federation Internationale du Sport Automobile) president Jean-Marie Balestre, still brooding over an old legal battle FISA lost to Peugeot, wants him out.

January 19--Moudjéria, Mauritania

Vatanen has officially been disqualified, but Peugeot has lodged a protest and asked that the Finn be allowed to continue until a final ruling has been made. The organizers have agreed to that.

There were no roads where we crossed the Mali-Mauritania border this morning, just washes, footpaths, horse and cattle trails--those sorts of things. It was a splendid place to get lost, and we did.

The rally is down to its last three days, and although we still have 827 miles to cover, only 371 of them are in race sections. The Camel Range Rover strategy at this juncture, as decreed by our team manager this evening, is to drive conservatively and make sure both of our cars get to Dakar. We're not going to catch the three cars in front of us, anyway, unless they have trouble, and going fast won't make them have trouble any sooner. With seven support trucks, an observation plane, 62 mechanics and enough spare parts to rebuild a car from scratch, how much trouble can Peugeot have?

January 21--Richard-Toll, Senegal

Yesterday, the entire rally was swallowed up in a sandstorm. We were stuck in a bunch of dune canyons in the Mauritanian desert, everybody driving every which way, trying to find a way out. It's a wonder we didn't have some head-on collisions. Finally, the race stage was canceled and a local camel herder was helicoptered in to lead us out. However, we ran out of daylight and ended up on an impromptu bivouac, everyone sharing what water and food he had. We start out in a race and end up on a picnic.

The camel herder led us out this morning, but every few miles he became disoriented and it took more money to clear his mind.

Vatanen was part of our sandstorm folly, but he is no longer part of the race. His disqualification stands and he won't be allowed to make the final glorious run into Dakar tomorrow. I feel for the guy. He won this rally and everyone here knows it, including Kankkunen, who seems a little sheepish about accepting the victory.

January 22--Dakar, Senegal

Dakar at last. This is a classy uptown coastal resort, big city all the way, an apparition after all the mud huts I've seen in the past three weeks. This is a city a lot of Americans would like. Find a different way to get here, though. Maybe it's just me, but the route I took seemed indirect.

Of the 603 of us who took that route, only 151 made it all the way. For the leaders, today's race--50 miles along the beach--was pretty much just a formality, since no one could possibly make up enough time to move up a spot. With Vatanen's banishment, Tambay was third and I finished fourth, five hours and 52 minutes off of Kankkunen's winning pace. I figure that Alain and I were lost a total of six hours and drove at least 200 unnecessary miles, but what the heck. People do that in a single weekend in L.A.

For all the personal satisfaction I'm feeling and the carnival mood that embraces this city, like so many others associated with the Paris--Dakar, I can't help but be affected by the sorrows this race has wrought. Yesterday, a car being used by a film crew hit a mother and child and killed them both. Earlier, in a village in Mali, a ten-year-old girl who was watching the race was struck and killed. Other accidents killed three competitors and left two paralyzed. Fifty more were injured. In ten years of Paris--Dakar, there have been 26 deaths. Obviously, the tragedy here is not that Ari Vatanen's victory was stolen.

It's going to be hard to go back to reality. The race is so long, it's like a war: You go out every day to do battle; you have a purpose, a direction, a specific goal that must be accomplished. That sort of focused effort can be intoxicating.

At the same time, there's no getting around the onslaught of discomforts and unpleasantries this race inflicts. You're hot, you're cold, you're thirsty, you're lost. You sleep on the ground nearly every night, surrounded by a mechanical cacophony. You're gritty and dirty with no shower in sight, and you're eating dinner out of a can. ...

Would I do it again?

I can't wait.

What a sight! It was straddling boulders I had to dodge. It was mowing down bushes and small trees."

"At the bottom lay a Mitsubishi--or what was left of one. Fiberglass sections were strewn everywhere."