2005 Dakar, Team Charlie and Dave Rauseo

Emails sent by Zoli, our assistance vehicle driver, during the Dakar:

Greetings from Spain,

To quote the movie 4 weddings & a funeral...... “I am in bewildered awe” of this event. To say that this is an event of a lifetime is an extreme understatement.

I have just finished day 3 and I’ve hit a wall with jet lag and the events if the past couple of days. It was a full day of travel with minimal sleep on the planes and finally landing in Barcelona at 9:00 am. That meant that we hit the pavement running. We met the guys from RallyRaid UK “RRUK” and the cars / trucks and bikes around noon at Olympic Stadium. They had just arrived from a 2 day trip from London. When I say we, I mean the group from the US, Charlie and David Rauseo who are racing and Mike Kryknock and me. Mike is the mechanic committed to the Rauseo’s. The Rauseo’s are renting their KTM bikes from RRUK. We spent the afternoon upgrading and modifying the bikes to the Rauseo’s preference. The service area was my first taste of jaw-dropping experiences. Seeing all of the competetive cars, trucks, bikes and all of the support vehicles was very inspiring. I hit the sack around 11pm while Mike worked on the bikes in the hotel parking garage for another 2 hours.

Today was an experience of a lifetime. We ran up to the storage area and finished prepping the bikes and my Nissan for the “scrutineering” which lasted about 5 hours. This process was a long but efficient event of getting the teams logged in with all of the technical and safety aspects. Near the end of the process we drove the truck inside the Olympic arena and that was very cool. I am hoping to get a picture to give you an idea of how this looks. All of the bikes, quads, cars, trucks and assistance vehicles go through a precise technical review. The ASO organization, that runs this event, was very efficient for such a large undertaking. After the inspection, we had to drive the truck about 10k through Barcelona to a lockdown. The drive was out of this world. Thousands of people were on the side of the road taking pictures of us. The storage lot was an unreal visual of racing machinery.

Tomorrow will be the first special of the race, a 6k race down the beach of Barcelona.

I will try to get more info to you soon but it’s difficult to get the time to steal the pc. Take some time and visit the RRUK website diary, Martin has probably put up some cool pictures of the team.

Barcelona is a fantastic city with craploads of scooters all over the place. Driving in this traffic is a wild experience. The RRUK team is a fantastic bunch of volunteers that are here to enjoy the race for the spectacle that it is. Hope to write soon.

I’d love to write more but the british chaps are busting my chops for writing a novel. At least I’m getting a better grasp of the mother language.

Cheers

Zoli

Hello all.

It´s 7am on new years eve.

I´ve got to start off by thanking Barbara for never once questioning this trip. It has been out of this world and the race has yet to

start. The ASO people and the people of Barcelona have been awesome. This is just a huge event for this town. Every TV channel here is talking Dakar all

day long. When we drove our route through town yesterday from scrutineering to the lock-down, people were stopping us for pictures and autographs all the way.

People are going nuts here. My truck is not a race truck but it sure looks like one. Everyone just looks in awe at the truck and points, wave and give us the thumbs up. The truck has all of our names on the side of it with our national flag and it´s pretty special. I even have my name in the Dakar program as the pilot of the #611 assistance truck. Pretty wild. The pits get pretty wild because they are open to the public. It reminds me of the pits in Supercross and you have all of these parents and kids walking by your pits and just geeking over your equipment. Our pits are pretty cool but when compared to the factory KTM or Nissan pits, we are just the little guys.

Rally Raid UK which is the group that I am with is supporting the Rauseo brothers from the USA as well as a rider from Guatemala, Mexico, 2 riders from Australia, 3 riders from the UK and Paul Round. Paul is the leader of Rally Raid UK. he has a personally built race truck that has a BMW turbo diesel motor with rover running gear and the body looks like a mitusbishi & rover custom mix. A wild machine to say the least. We have 4 trucks in our assistance fleet. Mine is a Nissan Patrol and it´s a 6 cyl Turbo Diesel with a 5 speed. Power windows and AC but the rest of the interior is gutted. 4 racing seats, a roll bar and a huge fuel cell. Unfortunately that leaves with very little room for tools and gear.

My job is to make sure the truck and the Mechanics make it to dakar. We also have 2 Land Rover Discoveries (they call them Disco´s), and the Ford F350 4x4 dually that has been tricked out big time. we will be caravanning throughout the trip with one of the trucks either running ahead to the bivouac (daily pits) or one truck runing chase behind the riders on the liason. The race today is just a short 6k sprint. Both Charlie & Dave are going to take it easy on today´s run. Tomorrow is a 900k liason (non competetive) which is just a drive on the highway to Granada. All the bikes and quads have to ride that also. No loading the bikes up. I can´t fathom riding my quad for 900k in one day on the highway.

I´ve had a chance to look at a few of the quads and it looks like the flavor of the year is the Bombardier DS650. These quads are very tricked out. There is one quad that´s based on a GSXR600 street-bike. They added a swingarm and a-arms and it sounds wicked. Don´t know how it will be out there but it´s very intimidating. Anyway, I don´t know how often I will be able to email since PC time in africa will be limited. I will do my best to get stuff to you all.

Please keep track on the Rallyraid site for dailey pictures from Martin if you care to. I hope you all have a Happy New Year. I will be thinking of you all.

Cheers

Zoli

Pilot #611 RRUK Nissan

Can you beieve I even type that out. Just goes to show you how much fun I´m having.

Well I´ve got a chnace to jump on the hotel pc for a few minutes so I thought I would send out an update. Just got in from our first day on the rally. We navigated ourselves about 20 miles away to the Barcelona Olympic Canal to set up pits. The pits were an impressive display of sheer $$$$$. The quads and bikes started out first and all 8 of our bikes made it through the 6k run on the beach. Almost all of them fell multiple times on what they said was all rutted out loose sand. The Rauseo´s got around 180th and 190th positions. Not very good but still in the rally. It was impressive to see all of the bikes come in and get serviced. They only had about an hour each in service and had to make it back to lockdown. Once all of the bikes were gone, we had to wait for the 2 cars. I told you of Paul Rounds car but we also have another identical one. Both made it fine. Impressive stuff was when Colin McRae came into the Nissan pits. Nissan has 4 huge Unimog rigs set up in the pits and when the 3 Nissan trucks came in, it was high tech service. They were right next to us so that was pretty cool. Robby Gordon came past in his VW and that beast was cool to. We cleaned up and navigated back to lockdown. Time to clean up, have a pizza and some beer and hit the sack. No New Years celebrating for me tonight. Like I said in an earlier email. 900k tomorrow.

Happy New Years

Cheers

Zoli Pilot #611 RRUK Nussan.

yeah, i had to type it again. i like the way it looks!!!

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