The Bar of the Dakar 2021. Cadets or Nerves on the edge of your skin? – Dakar

Wadi Ad-Dawasir, Arabia Saudita, January 5th. At the bar you can’t get away with it. Here you know everything and above all, you know perfectly well how to do everything. We taught the trade to Valentino Rossi, a Spithill, Messner e Maradona, among others. Don’t tell us!

Masks on the mouth, which are useful to hide the grimace of opposition, there is talk of the failure of the KTM which cost Matthias Walkner the Dakar, already winner in 2018. The mischievous sensation that the Austrian pupil of Heinz Knigadner did a c ***** a, or that the damage was much more serious than shown, therefore kept silent.

Two and a quarter hours to change the clutch plates are a blunder, the average calculated on the expertise of the patrons gathered here is a quarter of an hour at the most. So the damage was bigger o Walkner is… a cadet!

Let’s see how it went. Walkner hesitated to climb a dune, tried two or three times, then the clutch went off. He tried to repair, to start again, then he waited for a good Indian to lend him the records, he changed, lost bits and keys in the sand and after two and a half hours he left. At the Bar it is thumbs down unanimously. At the bar we warm up immediately: he is a cadet, or worse, a c ****** e.

Certainly Matthias got rid of the anxiety. Not so much of not knowing how to solve the problem, but the awareness of not being able to do it. Because? Because it didn’t have any spare clutch plates on the bike. Why not? A few hectograms of records right? Because – at this point Heinz Kinigadner intervenes – KTMs have never had a problem like this, so the replacement was useless. So Walkner lost his patience and his compass when he saw that the chance to repeat the success of 2018 was slipping away like the grains of sand that bury his pressure plate, the bolts, the keys. Now that kind of anxiety can be contagious because it’s easy for the defect was in the lot of clutch plates from which that defective package came. You will see that from now on all KTMs will have anti-anxiety replacement discs fitted to the bike.

Loeb and Elena, Peru, crazy to change a wheel to the Peugeot monster. Because? Because in order not to waste time changing the punctured wheel 50 kilometers from the finish, they decided to go ahead with the wheel on the ground. It’s something that bikers do quite often, which they don’t have to fix when the mousse goes up in smoke.

The sequence is dramatically logical, first the tire leaves in shreds, then the ground attacks the rim, finally, if the torture continues, the rim detaches and the hub remains exposed. At that point… luckily the Speciale is over, and then the problem is to pull down what’s left. Meanwhile the car went down and the metastasis also attacked the lower parts of the suspension. In short, when the work of removing the wreckage of the wheel is finished and he puts on the new one, Loeb and Elena, visibly tried by the fatigue, have give up and wait for the service truck to come and fix the rest. But the Speciale was over and the race continued, with no shocks apart from those suffered on the track.

Over time and in the editions one after the other there have been ridiculous scenes. Cars falling from the jack, which lose the wheels because the bolts were not tightened. We saw people planted in the sand up to their ears who could not go out without plates. And where were the plates? Leave in the place of the previous cover-up. Not to waste time!

The list of culpable “misfortunes” is long and borders on the improbable.

It is anxiety, that lose your head when unexpected trouble occurs, of a situation that changes suddenly e reverses the perspective. Pilots learn, if they don’t already have them, to have steady nerves, but it can happen to anyone. From private individuals who inevitably fall “going slow” and end their adventure there, we already have a couple of examples among ours, this year, to the proven champions who, one day, go haywire for a fatal mistake.

The cases of Joan Nani Roma and Marc Coma are memorable. Both led the race in two different editions. Nani ended up in a cul de sac and fell unconscious at the bottom of a valley from which he could not get out, and thus opened the way for the victory of Fabrizio Meoni, 2002. Coma, a few steps from Tambacounda, 2007, now in the Dakar straight, got lost in the bush and, unable to find the exit from the labyrinth of vegetation, ended up bang your head against a branch. He too completely blown away by the dead end circumstance, he let his eternal enemy win, Cyril Despres!

© Images: “Nani” Roma Media, BRX, Red Bull Content Pool, X-raid, Toyota Gazoo Racing, ASO, KTM, Honda, Rally Zone, Francesca Gasperi