Race to Dakar Read online

  Young, enthusiastic, brave - and a bit reckless - Simon competed in all the state championship enduros, the East Coast Championship and dozens of desert races. He was never a top racer, but usually finished in the front of the field and won the state championship for hare scrambles one year. For Simon, it was more about the crack and discovering parts of the outback he never normally would have experienced than racing to win.

  By the time he was nineteen, Simon was racing in six-day rallies in French Polynesia, the dirt-racing tropical paradise where he met Linley, who later became his wife. Having won a few stages and finished sixth overall, he was approached to race professionally in Japan.

  Sponsored by the owner of a Sydney bike shop, Simon headed out to Yokohama, where he spent four months racing. Although the job was everything he could have wanted, he hated living in a Tokyo suburb and had a hard time dealing with the pressure put on him to win. There's a big difference between racing for yourself because you love it and racing to win for someone else. If Simon won, the Japanese owners of the team gave him a quiet pat on the back - after all, winning was his job - but if he came second or third no one on the team would speak to him and he was threatened with being sent back to Australia if he didn't win the next race. It took all the fun out of what had, until then, always been a passion. To any outsider, it looked like Simon was living the dream, but he was seeing the dream from its other side. It meant taking risks and being prepared to get hurt because your employer expected it of you. By the time his visa came up for renewal, he'd had enough.

  In 1991 Simon packed his Honda XR600 in a crate, stuffed everything that he and Linley owned around it and came to England. His mother was English, so he had plenty of relatives to look up and no visa problems. He got a job in Catford, south London, training disadvantaged kids to be mechanics. He soon started entering British enduro races, representing the Victoria State team from Australia in the International Six-Day Enduro in 1993. In 1997, he scraped together enough money to enter the Atlas Rally in Morocco with some mates, including John Deacon, Britain's best enduro rider at the time. When he returned home, Linley took him aside.

  'You better do the Dakar now,' she said.

  'Where'11 we get the money?' Simon replied.

  'Just do it. We'll work it out,' Linley insisted. 'Don't talk about it anymore. Just do it.'

  With some help from the editor of Bike magazine and an XR600 loaned from Honda, Simon entered the Dakar as a true privateer - no support, no mechanic, just him - and finished. He was thirty years old and came fortieth, still his best result to date, but in the Dakar results don't really matter. Only getting to the beach in Dakar counts.

  By the time I bumped into Simon on the 2005 Dakar, his record stood at two finishes (1998 and 1999) out of four, a very impressive record, given that only a third of all bikes got through each year. In 2003 he had a mechanical fault in southern Libya and ended the rally with a five-hundred-mile taxi ride to Tripoli. In 2004, Simon broke his collarbone less than twenty miles from the end of the ninth special stage. When I met Simon at Tichit in 2005, he was nursing his left wrist, having fractured the radius a few weeks before the race. Fighting against the pain, he made it to Dakar in seventy-eighth position, giving him a tally of three finishes in five Dakars.

  A few weeks later, Simon was at the Alexandra Palace Bike Show, his wrist still strapped up. I knew that in Simon rested my best chance at the Dakar, but approaching him, particularly when I was asking someone who'd just finished the Dakar despite injury to be my water carrier - the lowest rank in any team - was a daunting prospect.

  I thought a racer like Simon would turn a novice like me down flat. After a few minutes' small talk, I made my pitch. T don't suppose you'd be interested, but I'm looking for someone who can help me with the Dakar,' I said.

  I hadn't asked Simon directly. And Simon didn't respond immediately - he later told me that he'd decided that he'd had enough after the pain of the 2005 rally - but he also hadn't turned me down.

  I told him about our plan to film a documentary about the privateers on the Dakar. 'Suppose that'd be interesting to see,' Simon said. 'You only ever see the guys at the front on telly -such a small part of the rally. Good story to be told.'

  Simon talked about what I'd be letting myself in for. 'There's so much involved in getting to the start line,' he said.

  'You have to enter in June and at that time the route's not even announced. You're paying seven grand to enter something, but you don't know where it's going or what the rules are.'

  I soon learned that Simon had a never-ending stream of Dakar anecdotes. 'In 1998, my first year, the road-book dropped through my letterbox in December. It was eighteen days that year and the first day was just short of a thousand kilometres. The second day was nearly twelve hundred kilometres. And I'm thinking, hang on, I've never ridden more four hundred ks in a day in my life! I just shat myself.'

  Again I asked myself why I wanted to put myself through such torture. 'Do you think I could do it?' I said.

  'It's not technical ability you need,' he said. 'It's stamina. They grind you down. Huge distances day after day after day. You want to get to Dakar - you've got to want to crawl on your hands and knees across broken glass. It's such a long way. Such a long, long way.'

  I told Simon a bit more about my plans. 'If you know of anyone who'd be interested, just let me know,' I said. Then I left Simon to think it over. I knew it would be a very difficult decision. Nursing someone else through the Dakar was a completely different proposition to doing it yourself. But for the last five years Simon had been running an off-road biking school. What better advertising for him, I thought, than getting a complete novice to the finish?

  A few days later Simon rang. About the Dakar,' he said. 'Yeah, might be interested.'

  I punched the air.

  'You need to start training straight away.' 'Yeah, of course. We'll get straight down to it.'

  On 12 April, more than two months later, I started training. I'd simply not got on with it before then. The night before, I met with Simon. He wasn't happy.

  'Thing is, Charley, I could go to the start line of the Dakar right now and be ready for it. Could you, Charley?' he said.

  'Er no,' I answered.

  Simon had me bang to rights. I'd had no training on sand. I hadn't ridden a bike with aggression and speed for a very long time - and never fast off-road. And I certainly had never ridden a bike full of fuel through a desert day after day for a fortnight. I had a lot to learn and Simon's concerns were very valid.

  'The Dakar's not like Long Way Round, Charley, stopping each day when you want. On the Dakar, you can't stop until you get to the end of the stage. You gotta get there before nightfall. From the moment the sun goes up, it's already setting.'

  I winced.

  'People don't realise it when they watch it on the telly, but when you come out at the end of the special section you've got maybe three hundred ks of liaison to the bivouac. And you probably had two hundred ks of liaison first thing in the morning, before the special. Never see those bits on the box, do you? You finish the special at four, five in the afternoon. It's dusk and you're setting out to ride from London to Paris. Only it's not a nice motorway.

  It's not even tarmac. If you're lucky it's a sandy track. But it could be dunes. And dunes in daylight are a nightmare.

  In the dark they're impossible.'

  I knew I had a lot to learn and I feared I'd taken on too much. But I also knew I had a big advantage in having persuaded Simon to join the team. When Ewan and I set off from London for New York neither of us had any idea what to expect. We were blown away by the state of the roads in Kazakhstan. This time, I'd be with someone who knew the tracks of the Sahara like his back garden.

  We started our first training session in typical Welsh drizzle, Simon watching as I reacquainted myself with riding a bike off-road. After an hour on a dirt bike, only part of it off-road, I had terrible arm pump. Shocked by the battering from my handleba
rs, the muscles in my arms were seizing up. It was obvious I had a lot of work to do on my physical fitness. Other than running a few miles, I'd not done a thing since speaking to Simon in early February.

  By the end of the first day off-road, I think I'd left Simon pleasantly surprised. I knew he didn't have high expectations of my ability, but I'd got through some of the hardest tracks; one of which was christened 'Oh Fuck Hill' by local riders. I could see what Simon was thinking. It was just what I would have thought -can an effete actor cut it with proper dirt riders? - so I knew I had to prove to him straight away that I had the guts to keep going.

  Time and time again, when Simon was waiting at the top of a rise while I lay in the dirt at the bottom, I picked up my bike and got back on it or pushed it up the hill. Simon had dropped me in at the deep end, but I'd survived and shown him I was prepared to put in the effort.

  For the first month of training we rode eight or nine hours a day for three or four days a week. It was intense, slog-it-out, carry-the-bike, pick-yourself-up-again-and-again riding, but I kept up.

  Shirty, the British Gas Gas distributor, had lent me two EC300 dirt bikes. These nifty two-stroke bikes were ideal for training. I could whack them around with relative ease and control them with greater sensitivity than larger bikes. I could ride them faster, thereby sharpening my reflexes. And if I fell off, I could pick them up without difficulty and carry on. The light bikes gave me lots of confidence and, as I gained confidence, the technical skills became instinctive.

  In the early days I made classic mistakes. We'd be trying to climb a really rutty uphill track and my instinct was to sit right on the back of the bike to put my weight over the rear tyre in order to get some grip. But it was the wrong approach. Dirt riders press down on the front wheel because they need their weight over the wheel that steers.

  Sitting at the back with arms out straight, it's impossible to control the front wheel properly.

  'Make the front go where you want it to go and the bike follows,' Simon would shout. 'Momentum. It's all about momentum. Momentum is our friend.'

  I was learning to ride in a totally new way. Most of my experience had been on road or track bikes, and it took a lot of concentration to undo the habits of a road rider. On the track, riding sports bikes, I'd learned to tuck in my elbows into an aerodynamic position. But on a dirt track you need to ride with your elbows sticking out wide. It's the only way you can absorb the bumps and maintain leverage on the handlebars.

  There were three elements to off-road riding: throttle control, clutch control and foot pegs. You had much more control and balance of the bike if you stood on the pegs, but it was difficult to get out of the habit of sitting on the seat. As soon as I sat down, I discovered, the bike was carrying me. On the pegs, I was controlling the bike.

  The second new thing was to learn to avoid using the brakes. Dirt bike riding involved using the throttle and clutch to maintain momentum. Moving off from a standstill and then trying to build momentum is very difficult on dirt.

  It was vital to keep going, particularly when going uphill. On a very technical or steep climb, there is a world of difference between complete standstill and a little bit of movement that could be built upon to maintain momentum. Keep pushing - a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more - that was the key. Another vital skill was to look ahead, so that I saw things early and could plan my route. I had to spot obstacles, such as boulders or narrow ruts, as early as possible, then I had to find an alternative route and commit to it, even if it was a tiny gap, and use my momentum to carry me through it.

  There were no great secrets to off-road riding. It was about courage, commitment, confidence and keeping a cool head.

  Nevertheless, the learning curve was as steep and hard as the trails that Simon forced me to master. I fell off a lot and picked up a lot of injuries in the early days. Some weeks I'd be covered in cuts. I gained scars I'll have for the rest of my life. I picked up a hairline fracture in my spine and crushed two vertebrae. I cracked ribs, recovered, then fell and cracked the same ribs again.

  After a few weeks I rode a really hard seven-hour training session with Simon and some local lads, including Lee Walters, a Welsh enduro legend who carved most of the trails through the mountains. All of them were expert riders with an intimate knowledge of the mountains. As soon as we set off I realised what was going on. They were out to break me. We rode up, across and through some of the nuttiest places I'd ever seen. We ascended banks as high as four-storey houses and almost as vertical. I had to ride with my chest pressing against the handlebars to keep the front wheel down - otherwise I would have cart wheeled backwards down the hill.

  I took a lot of hits. Screaming along a gravel road, doing around 50mph, the back end drifting out as I cornered, a branch caught my arm. Whipping me off the bike, it dumped me on the ground in a cloud of dust while my bike ran on. 'Fucking hell, Charley,' said Simon. 'We thought you'd had it.'

  Lee was laughing. 'Ten out of ten for that,' he guffawed.

  Ten minutes later another branch hit me square in the face and knocked me off my bike. For the next five minutes I couldn't see for stars circling my head. Another hour or so later, I took a big fall and could hear Lee and Simon speeding towards me, shouting to find out if I was still conscious. The next day I had black bruises running from my shoulder to my knee down one side of my body. Simon and his mates didn't let up the next day, or the day after.

  I returned to London barely able to walk, but I'd survived. In the eyes of the Welsh lads I'd been beaten but I felt proud. I'd kept up with them and everything they'd thrown at me.

  My only worry was that I'd started to make mistakes and take stupid falls in the last hour and a half simply because of exhaustion. And that worried me. At the same stage on a Dakar day - four to five hours after starting - I'd be passing the halfway mark at best.

  The only solution was to put in the hours, building bike fitness and stamina so that I would take longer to tire and so that when I was exhausted I could fall back on a sound technical skill base.

  When I wasn't in Wales training on the bike, I would train at a gym in London. I could tell by the size of my stomach that I needed to lose weight. When slouched in front of the television, I'd recently taken to balancing a dish on the top of my belly like Homer Simpson. It was ideal for dipping chips in ketchup.

  Thinking I'd been clever in starting my gym training early, in May I met for the first time with Natalie, a personal trainer who would let me know just how much work I still needed to do.

  Stripped to my shorts, I stood in front of Natalie's unflinching and rather bemused gaze as she ran a tape measure around my vitals.

  'Weight doesn't really matter,' she said. That sounded good.

  'It's more the size of your body,' Natalie said, 'to see whether you're putting on or losing fat. This is where I'm going to catch you out if you're not doing what I ask you to do. OK?'

  That didn't sound so good.

  'Just relax and look up,' Natalie said as she took the last of her measurements before consulting some tables and calculating my body mass index.

  'You are twenty-nine point three,' Natalie said, 'which is above the . . . erm . . . concerned level.'

  'How embarrassing,' I said. 'I'm in the "concerned" bracket?'

  'Yes.'

  I could see that the table from which she was reading had been stuck over another table on her piece of paper.

  'What's it covering up?' I said.

  Natalie peeled back the edge of the table to show what was underneath it. It was exactly same table with the same ranges of body mass index, but the categories were labelled in more blunt terms. According to that table, I was officially obese.

  Natalie giggled. 'I didn't wanted to hurt your feelings,' she said.

  'But I'm absolutely healthy,' I said.

  Natalie laughed again. So did I, nervously, as she led me out to the gym. 'How are you feeling?' she said.

  'Depressed. I don't fe
el obese. You can change me, can't you? I'm only 4 per cent over the limit.'

  Natalie devised a training plan to build up stamina, lose weight and increase strength and cardiovascular fitness. It involved running when I wasn't training on a bike and two to three gym sessions a week.

  Fitness and well-honed bike skills were only half the Dakar formula. Just as important was a good bike. As soon as Simon came on board he put forward Gareth Edmunds, a young, recently graduated motor sport engineer. Gareth had been involved in dirt bike racing since he was five years old and had known Simon for some time. He'd raced in the British and European Enduro Championships, but retired from racing in the final year of his university course to concentrate on bike mechanics. Gareth was studying in Swansea, about forty miles from Simon's home in the Brecon Beacons. He had prepared Simon and Nick Plumb's BMW bikes for the 2005 Dakar. The bikes had performed brilliantly, even though Gareth had developed it only in his spare time, studying at university from nine to four, then toiling every day in the workshop from five to midnight for months.

  No one in Britain had more up-to-date experience of preparing a BMW for the Dakar than Gareth. He'd also travelled with Simon and Nick on the Dakar as their mechanic - and even seemed to relish the bone-grinding exhaustion of spending a fortnight travelling every day in a support vehicle, then working through every night on the bike.

  Gareth was totally committed; even during the 2005 Dakar he was making notes on how to improve the design of his 2006 bike and compiling spares lists, just in case someone asked him to join their team. When we asked Gareth to build our bike, he immediately said yes.

  Gareth finished university at the end of June. On 20 July, after a short holiday, he set off for Germany to develop the rally bike at the Black Forest headquarters of Touratech, a name synonymous among bikers with off-road riding. Working with Herbert Schwarz, the company's founder, Jochen Schanz, his partner, Wolfgang Banholzer, a technician who had worked on the Dakar five times for BMW and Touratech, and Ian Rowley, Touratech's head of development, Gareth would spend the next four months in Germany.