Best thing about January? Hard to say. MacWorld? CES? NFL Playoffs?
For me, I think it's the Dakar Rally (Still hard not to call it the Paris-Dakar Rally, even though it hasn't started from Paris in a while.)
Scrutineering (tech inspection for us in the US) finished up today and according to the official press release, it's a record field this year: 231 bikes, 14 quads, 181 car crews and 85 trucks.
This year's rally will run from January 6 - 21, 2007, starting from Lisbon and ending in Dakar, a total of 7915 km.
This is really a beautiful race to watch played out over a series of days. Some of the footage is hypnotic, especially the desert segments. I'm not sure who's covering it for the US media, but last year I was able to find a consistent bittorent feed nightly from an Aussie station. I think it's pooled coverage, but they sure seemed to show a lot more than OLN, Speed, or whoever was covering it for the US.
While I'll watch pretty much any motorcycle racing with little or no prodding, the Dakar is even cooler because it's the only place I get to see big DAF trucks and Unimogs hauling ass through the desert.
I hope this year's race goes off without any casualties. The last two years have had three participants (all motorcyclists), and at least three spectators (children, as if it wasn't tragic enough) killed in various accidents.
Wikipedia says that over 40 participants have been killed since the race began in 1979 and an unknown number of spectators (records aren't/weren't always kept of the spectators across the different African nations.) Hopefully 2007's race doesn't add to that count.
KTM is always a manufacturer favorite, and this year is no different. The have three factory teams running in 2007 (Gauloises, Repsol and Red Bull).
One of the KTM privateer teams (San Francisco's Team Rally Pan America) are teaming up with Wheels 2 Africa after the race to backtrack along the course once the rally is finished and distribute medical supplies, food and other humanitarian aid to people in need.
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4 comments:
Ron, if you find any good torrent feeds for this race, let us know. I caught a bit of this last year on Speed Channel and it was great.
Just rented Dust to Glory on Netflix last week -- great documentary on the Baja 1000.
cheers!
Will do, Brian. No luck so far, but it's early days, yet.
I agree about Dust to Glory. Fantastic documentary. I love the footage at the beginning of the race when they're headed out of town, running through that aquaduct. You get a real feeling for how close the spectators are to the racers. Intense!
It's also pretty intense watching "Mouse" McCoy's attempt to solo the whole 1000+ miles on a bike. His deterioration as the race wears on is pretty fascinating to see.
And, ever time they'd show those privateers in their fairly stock VW bug, I had to smile. I think they were having as much fun as the factory guys for about a millionth of the budget.
Found a link to a torrent of some Aussie coverage of the first day of Dakar. It's still downloading for me, but the Aussie coverage last year was loads better than what I could get in the US.
Here's the link to Demonoid:
http://www.demonoid.com/details.php?torrent_id=598133&2325666/
Well, the torrent finished and it appears to be the same coverage that was shown on the North American channel Versus (formerly OLN).
I was hoping for some more in-depth coverage and maybe something from Toby Moody, but not so far.
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