The 2024 Dakar Rally will present the novelty of the 48 Hours Stage, a special stage divided into two days in which the drivers will have to travel, as usual, a stretch to the finish line. The organization, led by David Castera, considers it as a single stage, where the clock stops at 4pm on the first day, to continue where the participants left off.
Being something new and raising many doubts due to its nature, Motorsport.com, together with some other media, spoke to the race manager to give us more details, here they are.
What is the 48-hour stage of the Dakar?
The 48 Hours Stage of the 2024 Dakar Rally is a single special stage, in which motorbike and car drivers will split the routes, so there will not be a single route. All the kilometers that compose it will be covered on two different days, with the first starting at around 08:00 local time, stopping at 16:00, regardless of where you arrive, and with the key that you will not know the times until the next day, when you will reach the finish line.
After that, participants will travel to the nearest camp, where they will sleep after trying to repair their vehicles themselves. Furthermore, they will rest in a tent, as if it were one of the marathon stages they are already used to, but without some other comforts, such as food rations or toilets.
It will take about an hour to reach this sort of improvised bivouac, so by 5pm everyone will already be in their respective camps preparing for the next day. On the second day, the pilots will leave from the camp where they slept and from there, at dawn, they will go to the special stage to try to finish the timed section.
Once this stage is finished, which is actually two different stages joined together, the drivers will fly from Shubaytah to Riyadh, from where the Dakar Rally will resume after the rest day.
What is the route of the 48-hour stage of the Dakar?
The 46th edition of the Dakar Rally will see the debut of the 48-hour stage of the Dakar, in which drivers will have to complete 209 kilometers of link, but it will not be the same number for motorcycles and cars regarding the special section. The two-wheel category will have to cover 626 kilometers between the two days, while heavy vehicles will have to brave 572 kilometers of dunes.
“I'm not going to make history, I've done the journey, the things, now let's see,” David Castera commented to the media. “The first week was a good challenge with what we had to control, we did it and now people don't realize it, but the 48 Hours is a mess for us, interesting.”
Furthermore, it will be very complicated for the top drivers to receive help from the assistance: “The regulation we have made is that all the trucks, before starting to provide assistance, must go to sleep, and from the morning, at eight, they can help someone who is at any point of the stage”.
“There is always a special percentage that they have to meet before going, because if it's not easy, they go on asphalt,” said the transalpine. “So, we said that the first 200 kilometers, which is not that easy, and if some of those trucks complete it in time, to then go out, if they want, they can, but they can't go off the road and go in.”
Number of camps for the 48-hour stage of the Dakar
One of the big questions that arose at the bivouac is how many bivouacs there will be in the 48-hour stage of the 2024 Dakar, and David Castera has assured that there will be up to seven bivouacs, with a letter for each, from A to G. The person in charge of the race commented that there will be a first rest point at kilometer 200, with a second at 250, very close to the third and fourth, and from there there will be another one every 20 kilometres.
The organization predicts that no one will reach field G, which would actually be six and is fixed for safety, and only three or four could reach F, the penultimate stopping point of this special. Although the most important thing for them is that there will be nothing for hundreds of kilometers, without contact with any other human being or animal, except in A and D, which are a little closer to a settlement with people.
However, in B, there will be up to 250 kilometers with nothing or no one nearby, and to solve the problem of the closest bivouacs, all of them will be located at the bottom of a dune, so that the sand itself blocks the participants' vision.
What are the bivouacs like for the 48 Hours of the Dakar?
Being far from any place of life, the pilots will be alone when the sun sets and the night closes over their heads, in camps where they will only have a tent, a sleeping bag and a military ration, purchased expressly from a supplier for carry out the 48-hour stage.
The organization will allow participants to have six one-liter bottles of water per person, and when refueling they will also be able to fill them up, thus avoiding dehydration. Furthermore, there will be no toilets, so if they want to relieve themselves they will have to do it in the middle of the desert and, obviously, they won't be able to take a shower.
The dangers and how the 48-hour stage of the Dakar is managed
The 48-hour stage of the Dakar presents a number of obvious dangers, and the main one is how a driver would be transferred in the event of a serious accident. However, the organizers are very confident that there will be no problems when it comes to having to assist a participant, because it is “just like a normal stage”.
David Castera has assured that he will treat this special stage like all the other twelve, although it is true that the distance to any hospital is much greater than elsewhere. From the furthest and most inhospitable point, it is about 150-160 kilometers without any hospital nearby, but if an accident occurred, he would first travel to Shubaytah, for a check-up, and then see if there was a plane to Riyadh the next day.
The logistical challenges of the 48-hour stage of the Dakar
Managing to make a 48-hour stage in the current edition of the Dakar is a great challenge for the organization, which has been planning for months how to achieve it after a visit by David Castera to the Empty Quarter desert. The Frenchman explained that they started preparing the special stage five days in advance, since it is about 600 kilometers of special stage and they have to set up seven camps with military food rations, even if there is little of it.
The promoters of the toughest race in the world sent a helicopter to distribute everything, calculating the margin they had to be mounted and make a food distribution so that no one was left without their ration, and in case there was a mistake , they kept that margin from 4pm to 5pm to make an adjustment.
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