Dakar Rally 2010

The Dakar Rally is under way once again. This year it is again being held in South America between Argentina and Chile, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires. The reasons for movign the rally to South America is due to security issues Africa.

This year new regulations have been introduced for the bikes which limits the engines to 450cc. As this is the first year of the new rules, bikes with larger engines will be allowed to compete provided they have restrictors fitted to limit the power of the bikes. This could put the larger bikes at a disadvantage due to them being heavier but restricted to the same power as the 450cc bikes.

Amongst the bike starters are five British competitors: Craig Bounds, Andrew Neri, Paul Carlyle, Duncan Tweedy and the only British female this year Tamsin Jones. Of the 161 bike starters this year there are only 106 remaining going into stage 6 of 14. Only four of the British riders are still in the race: Bounds, Carlyle, Neri and Jones.

Running along side the Dakar Rally, the organisers have also teamed up with ManyPlayers.com in order to run a real-time Virtual Dakar game along the same route as the actual Dakar Rally. This allows players around the world to plot routes, configure bikes and set attack levels to try and complete the stage in the fastest time. Although push the bike and rider too hard and they’ll need to stop for a rest of either 15 minutes or 1 hour, depending on whether you’re a paying player or not! However, the game doesn’t finish at the end of the leg, players also have to decide how their rider is going to spend time in the bivouac at night, balancing time repairing the bike and allowing the rider time to rest. The game currently has over 100,000 players with approximately 11,000 people online at anyone time.

The only complaint I’ve got is that there is a distinct lack of coverage of the Dakar Rally in the UK media. The only video footage is that which is published on the official Dakar Rally website – two videos a day of 5 minutes each and a third which is a repeat of one of the first two without commentary, plus some textual news updates during the day. Even Lithuania has more coverage of the Dakar Rally than the UK!