In which Doris sits in air-conditioning looking at the sand and at screens.
Sid has painted the picture of the dune-bashing, desert-baking, silence/noice contrasts and sheer sandy grind that is the lot of almost of all of the rally-raid participants and support crews. But Doris is in a different world in this event.
Her event started in Yas Marina, collecting control room equipment and going to the competitors’ briefing in the room that we were familiar with from Yas Marina F1 Marshal briefing days.
As Sid roamed round the service park, Sheila and Doris were already heading south, towards the Qasr Al Sarab resort/hotel where the rally would be based for the next five days.
You may be able to see on the picture (if you click on it you can see a bigger version) that this is on the right/eastern side of the Liwa Crescent in the south of Abu Dhabi. Under the crescent are large orange sand dunes. North of it are flatter salt plains with sand drifting across them. And when you zoom into the details, there are flat bits and sandy bits everywhere to keep the competitors on their toes.
Anyway, night falls at 6:30 as it usually does in the UAE and Doris and Sheila arrived (via the tradesmen’s entrance) in the extremely palatial “desert resort” of Qasr Al Sarab.
We drive in to the central courtyard, ignored the polished offering of the valet parkers and park our grubby old cars as close as possible to their lovely shiny wooden doors to get our computers, routers, printers and PCs set up in the BeesKnees Centre.
Our accommodation is in the “Associates Village”, carefully placed about a km away on the other side of the hill (there is plenty of room in the desert) where the guests won’t dream we exist, above the steep sandy slope leading down a further km down to the Bivouac. The Village is a really nice staff facility, and for anyone reading this from the UK before December 2022 (because it is geographically- and time-restricted) there is a great BBC programme on it here. Our twin-bedded room has generous amounts of space and storage for living in, it feels like student accommodation rather than a hotel room.
Up before dawn to get the rally started next day – fortunately the staff’s cafeteria starts early too. The rally is actually two separate events, “Moto” for bikes and “Auto” for cars. They have different international governing bodies, and there are different clerks of the course and stewards for each event. However the management of the physical stages – time controls, safety equipment and medics – is run by a single group, exactly the same as when you find two different formula races happening on a racetrack in one day.
So on the control staff we have Rob Whittaker on the radio supported by Sheila and me, Sean Petherbridge as Chief Medial Officer, a technical specialist from the rally-raid series organisers who is managing their satellite-based tracker system (it’s the first year we’ve had to use this), the Moto Clerk of the Course and the Auto Clerk of the Course.
I have embarrassingly forgotten the name of the Moto CoC because he is just known as “that man with the amazingly irritating phone ring-tone”. The phone only ever rings when he is out of the room and he always always always leaves it on the desk. The Auto CoC is someone we know and like already from our Yas Marina work in 2010 and 2011, Ronan Morgan. He’s persuaded Bobby Willis, another enormously experienced Irish Navigator to come along and be his deputy.
Control room days are long because the radios are live from the time that the first competitors start their run-out, until we are sure that everyone who wants to leave the desert has done so/is definitely off the soft stuff and the sweep and medical teams can be stood down at the end of the day. Around 12 hours most days.
The competitors’ experience is very different, with the top competitors taking about 2-3 hours to do the day’s stage – a single stage with a refuelling/neutralisation zone of 20 minutes in the middle. The bikes leave early to get the benefit of the cooler dawn temperatures, then the cars and then the trucks. The top competitors are spaced 3 minutes apart to allow the dust to settle, so it takes nearly 4 hours to get all the competitors underway. These pictures show the control room’s overview map (sorry, it is the one that got repurposed as Elliot’s birthday card) and then a screen shot once almost everyone has taken the start.
The ones who are starting at the back are also the ones most likely to have problems, and a 3 hour drive for the top boys can easily turn into a 8 hour drive at the back, so the evenly-spread green spots in the screen picture gradually turn into a spatter of sad little left-behind markers.
The control day therefore falls into a rhythm – very quiet as dawn breaks and the head of the rally gets underway, then picking up round about 11:00 as some people have problems and get them fixed. Round about 2pm we get into the long pull for home as a trail of around 6-8 competitors are still doggedly plugging onwards, followed increasingly closely by sweep teams. Every day there is someone who insists on pressing on until darkness prevents the medical helicopters from being able to fly and the stage is declared closed.
On the left here we have Rob Whittaker battling with a radio system he didn’t specify. Still it is probably no worse than his usual kit, the British Army’s legendarily awful Bowman system. And on the right Sean Petherbridge, who is now the new Syd Watkins at the FIA and CMO for the event, plotting where to move his helicopters so that they are always 15 minutes max from any competitors.
All other communication stops when Dave Richards comes to visit the control room. Prodrive are in the paddock and Dave is also Chairman of Motorsport UK. After some fangirl behaviour from Doris he casually says that if she is ever near Banbury she should drop in. Little does he know….
Meanwhile Mifter Bat looks longingly out at the desert, too far away and too hot to fly for a small bat.