The Dakar Rally: Robby's Wicked Week

The Dakar Rally: Robby's Wicked Week

By Bill Wood

This is difficult. American Robby Gordon had such an incredible shot at winning The 2012 Dakar Rally. The overwhelming might of the Volkswagen team was gone. Gordon's Team Speed Hummers were among the fastest in the event. The fact that they were RWD and they were running with or, even, outrunning the AWD Minis on the stages is a testament to Robby's development skills, his driving prowess and his sheer, staggering nerve to believe he could stare down the BMW/MINI brigade and beat them at their own game. Just stunning.

But depending on what you believe, Robby's uphill climb might have been just too much to overcome in South America. If you're in a jingoistic mindset, you might believe that Dakar officials would never allow an American to beat the Euros in the rally game no matter where it's run.

If you're in the technology camp, you might believe that it was just too much to expect that a "privateer" team could muster the resources to outrun a factory in the mountains of Argentina, Chile and Peru; these roads were on the roof of the world, after all.

If you're in the realistic camp, you might believe that it's just too much to ask that anyone could win this event on purpose. It's just too much to ask for!  To paraphrase the professor in Back to the Future, where these guys were racing "there are no roads!" You're lucky to finish this adventure. Winning isn't done on purpose. You do it by outlasting everyone else and beating back the terrain.

At the end of Week One, Gordon and his co-driver Johnny Campbell were on the threshold of winning. He'd finished third on Stage Two and second on Stage Five. He was fourth overall last weekend after Stage Five when the convoy drove into Chile over the Paso San Francisco, a near 16,000 ft. elevation mountain pass that was pummeled by snow and hail in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere summer. On the rest day that followed there were smiles in the Team Speed camp. They were ready to make noise at the top of the 2012 Dakar podium when they got out of the Andes and reached the finish in Peru. This is a description from co-driver Campbell after Stage One last Sunday:


Sure, there were problems with their teammate's Hummer H3. Defending Dakar winner Nasser Al-Attiyah had nagging problems with his car literally from Day One.

Gordon had to tow Al-Attiyah's car back to the bivouac that Sunday evening. The engine had stopped. It was a conspicuous start.


Al-Attiyah is a rally veteran and a Dakar veteran from Quatar who'll run in the World Rally Championship this year with Citroen. He won Dakar last year with Volkswagen. Al-Attiyah is a world class rally driver. Still, that first day's problem saw Al-Attiyah fall to 38th in the standings. He proved his mettle, however, by winning Stage Two to climb back to sixth overall after Day Two.


He was third on Stage Three but bobbles with the route and car problems saw Nasser stumble backwards to seventh then eighth after the fifth stage. A win on Stage Seven saw him climb back to sixth in the rankings. And a fifth on stage eight kept him there.

That detail is necessary to give some context to what happened next on Stage Nine. You could say Al-Attiyah's Hummer fell apart around him and he was left with no choice but to surrender to The Dakar and withdraw. Fan belts broke. Belts and straps also surrendered. The frustration on Al-Attiyah's face spoke the thousand words pictures are supposed to represent. At one point Nasser turned to the camera and said he'd asked that the strap be replaced. Now he was holding pieces of it in his hands.