It’s like being thrown into the mosh-pit at an AC/DC concert: your vision blurs and the world vibrates. Ruts and ridges, dips and drops, changing cambers punctuated by knee-deep holes and gum trees on both sides. The Colo Park 4WD racetrack near Windsor, NSW is as rough as guts. I give him the thumbs-up and he dumps the clutch, twin rooster-tails of dirt spewing into the air as 480Nm of turbo-diesel grunt hurls the Isuzu forward. Time for some off-road mayhem.īruce’s larrikin voice sounds in my headset. We’re a world away from Buenos Aires and the real Dakar, but I am strapped into the same turbo-diesel rally truck that carried Garland to 11th place (and first privateer home) in last year’s Dakar. This is a snapshot of what it must be like to line up at the start of the Dakar rally to be one of nearly 400 vehicles preparing to tackle 9000km of some of the toughest desert and mountain terrain on the planet. WEDGED into the Sparco race seat of Bruce Garland’s 2009 Isuzu D-Max Dakar rally truck, the mercury sitting north of 35 degrees, my helmet drips with sweat, and the harness digs into my chest.
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