Day 5, Dune race

Today was the shortest day of the rally. This day is different from the other days since it is more like an 80km MX race on sand dunes. There are 4 laps in total an you only need to pay attention to the navigation the first lap and then you can concentrate on doing the other laps as fast as possible. Again, it was really hot today and the sand was dry and soft but me and Carl found a very good tempo and made no mistakes. I do not know the results yet but I think we have advanced up to second place in the totals by now. I will have to confirm that in the evening.

Early morning at prestart. View of erg Chebi.

Since the day is fairly short this day also work as a rest day for the drivers and I have just changed oil and filter on the motor and on the gearbox. Air filters and skins are changed everyday. I have also changed back to the Desert rear tire from the MX tire I have been using during the two dune days. The front tire is also a Michelin Desert and I am using the same front tire the whole rally. The rear Desert tire is changed once during the rally.

The rest of the guys, and gal, in Team Rally Raid Sweden are at good spirit and people are less tired now than yesterday and the day before. The mood is usually directly related to how tired people are and how the results are so when people are talking and laughing it usually means they have had a good day.

My cold is making me feel lousy and really hope it would end but it would not surprise me if it does not go away until I get back to Sweden.

Tomorrow will be another long day with some demanding specials that will take us back up north to Missour. All we need to do now is to focus on keeping our position. There will not be much room for big time differences among the top riders for the rest of the rally unless someone makes a mistake and gets penalties.

Day 2, Missour - Merzouga

Today's stage brought us more beautiful views of the high Atlas. The day started with a special with a lot of riding in riverbeds and several fast high speed sections. I don't know the results yet but it felt pretty good. After that there was some liasons and navigation stages and lastly a second special that took us down to Merzouga in southern Morocco. We also took the time to stop at a gas station during one of the liasons and had a quick cup of coffee and a chat with some English blokes that we usually meet at the rally.

Yesterday me and Carl, the guy I'm team-riding with, ended up on 5th place and we are very pleased with the result. That meant we started in the second line this morning and we caught up with all the previous riders except Tomkinson, an English bloke who won the rally last year, so hopefully we closed the gap to the riders ahead of us in the results list.

The day was good and we only had some minor problems at the end with dust from the cars at the high speed sections. But with a wide open throttle we managed to get by them eventually...

My rear tire was a lot more worn this year compared to last year so I decided to change it today (one day earlier than planned). And I had some minor fixes to do on the bike so I was not done until nine at the evening. I'll see if there is something eatable from the dinner and then I'll call it a night. The entire day of tomorrow will be a special so we have a demanding day ahead of us.

Day 1, Nador - Missour

Today was the first day of the rally and it started with a 400km stage that took us from Nador at the coast up into the Atlas mountains to the city of Missour. The enduro path through a steep canyon (that I described a bit in the previous post) went well for me and my riding partner Carl Hagenblad. We got off early from the start at the port in Nador so we were among the first up the canyon so we didn't have any problems with other riders standing in the way. After the enduro path there were some technical navigation stages followed by a special that took just about under an hour.

The mechanics at work in Missour

The special was a mixture of somewhat tricky navigation and technical riding in a long riverbed. We made no mistakes and had a good flow through the special. The only problem was that there was a lot of cars that we caught up with and the dust makes it extremely difficult to try to pass them.

We were the first ones of the Swedes to reach the finish and the Berglund brothers showed up a short while after us so I don't know how it went for the others yet. The results of today will probably be posted later this evening. All in all it was a good first day and I'm happy with how the day went. The cold I felt yesterday doesn't seem to get any worse so hopefully that will not become a problem.

The upside of being among the first to reach the base camp is that the showers are hot and the toilets are working. :) Plus, you have a lot of time to get everything sorted for the next day. Right now its about 1830 and I'm all done for today so now I just have to focus on eating and talking to new and well known faces.

Day 0, scrutineering

This was the first day of the Tuareg rally and pretty much the whole day was spent at the port of almeria, in Spain. The day consisted of getting my paperwork done and getting the bike and myself through inspection. The paperwork mostly consist of stuff needed for customs as the routines for entering with a vehicle into Africa is not the fastest. The bike is checked for function; brakes, wheel bearings, brake lights, etc, and you have to show your complete safety kit before you are cleared and can load your bike back on the service truck.

Everything passed quite smoothly for me and most of the other Swedes so I was all done by lunch and could spend the rest of the day taping my roadbooks so by now I have taped all the roadbooks for all nine days. This is good since it means I will have more time to do other things during the rally.

A bad thing is that I got a sore throat and it feels like I am getting a cold and that precisely what I don't need right now. Doing a rally is hard enough without being sick. We will see how it feels tomorrow.

The stage tomorrow is quite a long one and the day starts with an enduro track in the mountains that can be somewhat challenging for some of the riders. The main purpose of the enduro track is to make the riders think again about wether they should stay in the Profi group or switch to the Amateur group.

I'm sitting in the wait room at the port right now and there is no WIFI here so we will see when I will be able to post this. Maybe tomorrow night in Missour but chances are small they will have internet there so it might not be until we are in Merzouga.

[Note] They had WIFI in Missour so I'm posting this on Day 1 of the race.

Day before scrutineering

Today was the day before the scrutineering and I spent a couple of hours doing some last minute checkups on my bike to make sure that nothing has been damaged during the transport down to Spain. Went over my riding gear and made sure I had all the neccessary stuff needed for the mandatory emergency kit. Each motorcycle driver needs to carry emergency rockets, a map of Morocco, a lighter, a compass, a rescue blanket, 4 litres of water, a cell phone, a set of tools for your bike and, of course, a helmet. If you happen to miss one of those items during any of the unannounced checks you will get heavy time penalties so you better have your gear sorted.

The riders checking their bikes one last time

Everything looked good on the bike and after a short shakedown ride to make sure everything worked properly and that nothing was coming off the bike I packed my gear and am now looking forward to relaxing the rest of the day. Björn Nygren, another rider in Team Rally Raid Sweden discovered some weird engine noices and is nervous about an imminent engine problem. Hope everything works out for him.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rally and the whole day will be spent in the port of Almeria with scrutineering. Getting all your paperwork done, getting the bike through inspections, and preparing everything before boarding the ferry that will take us over to Nador in Morocco. The ferry usually leaves at about 2300hrs so I'm expecting to spend at least 10-12 hours at the port. Fun times. Hopefully we will have a smooth crossing over to Africa and then the actual racing will start in Morocco on Monday morning.

The rally bike of 2011

I thought I would try to sum up what I have done to the bike to prepare it for the rally this year and also to take the opportunity to show it off for all you petrol heads out there.

KTM 530 EXC SixDays Rally Lite Edition

The bike is a KTM 530 EXC SixDays 2010 with about 55hrs on it. My goal has been to build a "rally lite" bike just as I did last year. That is, I try to do as little modifications as possible and I try to keep the bike as light and slim as I can by not putting on to much stuff on it. Rather taking things away to keep the weight down. The reasons for building a lite version are mainly these:

140/80 Michelin Desert is
one wide tire...

• Keep everything you do as simple as possible. The less complicated the less chance it will break and the easier it will be to repair in the field.
• Every custom part you put on must be field tested before the rally. And by field testing I mean a lot of tough riding not just riding down a dirt road for a while. Preferably you should do a race with the part on your bike before you can trust it.
• If you build your own parts instead of buying parts of a well known brand you need to test it even more.
• The more stuff you put on, the more stuff that can break. And things do break. The most effective way to prevent something from breaking is not to put it on.

The non-standard components on chassis and engine are:

• Rebuilt front suspension (springs, shims)
• Rebuilt rear suspension (springs, bladder)
• Cylinder head ported
• Carburator (jets, etc) adjusted on bench
• Akrapovic exhaust

A degreased chain will last longer in the desert

All these mods were made by the previous owner and since the bike has done one previous rally I consider these mods to be well tested.

Here is a list of the preparations I have done to the bike just before this rally:

New plastic and decals just
for good looks

• New wheel bearings
• New grips (soft to reduce vibrations)
• New motor oil and oil filter
• New gear box oil
• New fork oil (thicker)
• Checked and greased steering head bearings
• New brake fluid
• Checked all electric wiring for wear and function
• Mounted electric wiring for the roadbook holder
• Mounted navigaton tower
• Mounted roadbook holder (MD with backlight and remote)
• Mounted GPS mount (I'm using a Garmin Foretrex 201)
• Mounted remote control for the trip computer
• New (dry) chain and sprockets
• New Michelin Desert tires and Michelin Desert mousse (front, rear and second rear wheel)
• Cleaned the carburetor
• Changed cooling fluid to Engine Ice
• Mounted large 13L tank
• Mounted rear fender bag
• Put thread lock on pretty much every single bolt on the bike
• Checked brake pads (they were almost new so I didn't change them)
• New plastic and new decals (absolutely no function, just for good looks :)
• Charged the battery
• Mounted custom skidplate with water tank

Aluminum skidplate with water tank

Apart from that I have pretty much checked everything else on the bike for wear and function. Spokes, handlebar controls, gas wire etc. Every part of the bike needs to be in mint condition if  you want it to run smoothly through an eight day race without any major problems.

Roadbook holder, GPS, trip computer and remote controls

As per usual when preparing a bike for a race, most of the work is not visible so you will not get any credit for it from someone who doesn't understand how much work that goes into something like this. But thats just how it is. :)

Now its only two days left before I'm leaving for Spain and I can't wait to get on the bike and head out to the dunes!

Spare levers strapped to the skidplate

Both front and rear suspension has been modified

Ready to jump over those Sahara dunes!

Carburetor cleaning

One of the less exiting but absolutely necessary bike prep you need to do before going on a desert race is cleaning your carburetor. Even if you don't do races you should clean it once every year anyway just to save you trouble. A carburetor is an ancient piece of technology for combustion engines as compared to injection. But it has its pros and cons. On the plus side is that since the construction of a carburetor is so simple it is mostly possible to fix it, should a problem occur, when you are out in the middle of nowhere far away from your sterilized garage. You basically cannot fix an injection. Most people will carry an entire injection kit (or several) as a spare when doing rallies.

Removing and cleaning jets

My cleaning procedure consists of taking apart most of the carburetor. Cleaning each part and checking for wear and tear. All jets, the mixture screw, needle, float, float needle, the throttle valve, the accelerator pump etc etc. And when everything is nice and clean I put it back together again.

When I put it together again I usually put just a little bit of thread lock on the screws to make sure the stay fastened. I also put some thread lock on the mixture screw so it won't come lose. (I actually lost my mixture screw in a rally in 2008)

As I said, not the most exiting bike prep but a carburetor problem can possibly ruin an entire race so it is definitely a must.

Cook it, peel it or leave it

Cook it, peel it or leave it; is a pretty well know slogan among world travelers and it holds equally true for how you should approach food served during rallies. Most often desert rallies take place in countries where the type of bacterias that are found in food can be quite different to what your body is used to. And it is not unusual that the handling of food is done under conditions that are far from ideal when it comes to hygiene. Thats why I always bring my own food and if I am to eat any of the local food it has to be really hot and newly cooked. If its luke warm or has been kept warm for a long time I wont touch it. Same goes for salads and stuff.

Lunch break in a canyon in Morocco

The food I bring is mostly dehydrated food that come in ration packs. All you need to do in order to cook them is to fill the bag they come in with boiling water and wait a couple of minutes and then they are ready to be eaten. During the day when I'm riding I will eat various energy bars and I always try to throw in some canned food to mix it up since only eating energy bars can be quite tough on your stomach.

This is how my typical food intake would look like, and will look like this year too.

• Breakfast: Dehydrated breakfast ration pack (cold)
• During the day when racing: Various bars (Flapjacks/protein bars), canned tuna or similar
• Dinner 1: Dehydrated dinner ration pack (hot)
• Dinner 2: Dehydrated dinner ration pack (hot), and some small pieces of what I find eatable from what is served by the rally organization.

Apart from that, I just try to constantly eat while I am at base camp in order to get as much energy back into my body as possible. A friend of mine wore one of those heart monitors during a race and it showed he had burned 7,000 calories during one race day so you really need to eat as much as you possibly can.

Dehydrated breakfast

Bringing your own food and being really picky with what you eat of the local stuff is an easy way to avoid getting ill during a rally. Getting the shits during rallies in Africa is so common it's not even funny. Just ask anyone who's been to a rally and they'll tell you.

Wheel bearings

So, it's about three weeks until the bikes are loaded on the service truck and begins the journey down to Spain so its time to start doing bike preps. I've mentioned the steering dampers I will be using in an earlier post and today I  want to say a word about wheel bearings. Or actually two words: Change Them!

During the years I have made it a habit of changing the wheel bearings every year on all my bikes no matter if I got them brand new or used. I have had a rear wheel bearing fail on me once and it totally destroyed the entire hub. Costing me several hours of work to replace the hub. When it happened I had checked the bearings when I changed tires just a couple of riding hours before it happened and they all seemed fine. So I learned the hard way that when bearings fail they can fail so fast that you will not notice it until it's too late. And I might add that that particular bike was less than a year old and with me as the first and only owner.

Fill the gap with grease and your bearings will live longer

While I'm at it I might as well share a tip about wheel bearings. Once you fit the new ones on there will be a gap between the bearing and the sealing. Make sure you fill that gap up entirely with grease (also do this if your bike is brand new from the factory). The bearings themselves are sealed so the grease will not lube the bearings but it will act as a barrier and prevent water and dirt to get in and reach the bearings. And water and dirt is what will kill your wheel bearings. I've done this for a couple of years and it really does make a huge difference.

If we go back to fact that bearings can fail fast it should be obvious that I will never go to a rally without having brand new wheel bearings on. Most manufacturers have wheel repair kits that contains all bearings, seals and spacers that you'll need and they are relatively cheap and it's quite an easy operation to change them. So changing my wheel bearings is an easy insurance that my bike will take me through deserts and rivers for thousands of kilometers without any troubles.

Some info about the Tuareg Rally

The Tuareg Rallye has been around since 1999. Last year it gathered more than 200 motorcycles and 30 cars. It starts in Almeria, Spain and continues down through Morocco and then turns around and finishes in Mojacar in Spain.

The rally track stretches over more than 3000 kilometers and the competitors will have to navigate their way from the port of Nador in the north, through the impressive Atlas Mountains and the city of Missour, and then continues down to the massive sand dunes in Erg Chebbi in the vicinity of Merzouga in the south close to the border to Algeria. Once in Erg Chebbi, which is part of the Sahara desert, the competitors will have to face long days with nothing but sand and dunes that can reach up to 200 meters high.
After conquering the desert, the competitors finds their way back to the northern parts of Morocco through ravines, river crossings, and rocky donkey trails to finally reach Nador again where a ferry awaits to take them back to Europe where the rally ends with a final special stage between Almeria and Mojacar.

Early morning at pre-start

I personally think that the Tuareg rally is the most affordable desert rally that is currently out there. It is relatively low cost and the organization is very good. Plus, the regulations are very forgiving in the sense that if you fail to finish one day, say you have some mechanical problems for example, you can still start the next day. Of course you will get the appropriate time penalties (which can be quite heavy) but they will not kick you out. So you can still have a lot of fun and get a lot of riding and experience even if your chances of a top position is gone.

Another good thing about the rally is that they don't require you to put on a lot of required extra stuff on your bike, like sentinels and iritracks and whatnots, which also helps in keeping the costs down for the individual rider.

3-Hours Enduro Race

This weekend I packed my gear, loaded the bike and took an hour and a half drive down to Norrköping south of Stockholm to participate in the 3-hour Enduro race. The race is a yearly event held by the local club SMK Kolmården. The race is simple enough: you race for 3-hours straight and the rider with most laps and shortest time wins. Last year was my first time at this event and I teamed up with Carl Hagenblad and our two-man team finished 13 out of 39 teams. This year they've added a one-man team class. Of course I couldn't let that training opportunity let me pass by so this year we decided to race by ourselves. Each man on his own. That means three hours of constant riding except for stopping for fuel or eating.

Ronnie Bodinger, whom together with me and Carl Hagenblad raced in the Tuareg Rally 2010, showed up with his brand new Husaberg. Ronnie is preparing for the Dakar Rally 2011 so he is trying to get some mileage on his two Husabergs. One of them will be his racing bike and the other one is brought for spares. I wish him the best of luck in his preparations and I'm sure we'll hear more of him as we get closer to the rally.

The start went fairly smooth and most of the riders were keeping a quite moderate pace except for the top riders, of whom most are competing in nationals so they are at a whole other level than the rest of us enduro wannabes, so I guess I was not the only one trying to find a pace that I would be able to sustain for three hours. After a couple of minutes I pass Ronnie whos bike had stopped. Later it turns out he spent an hour trying to get it running again so it wasn't much of a race for him.

Turn left for shifts and the pit. Right if you're a loner.

Half way through the first lap I passed another friend of mine, David Åkerskog. David beat me by one place in the 4-days Enduro event this summer and he's been letting me hear it every time we've met ever since so I sure wasn't going to let him beat me this time. This is, by the way, another great thing that I really like about this sport. Most of the people I've gotten to know through riding are all very relaxed and friendly people. Sure, when the race is on we all get competitive and race as hard as we can, and of course we'll psych and rant each other before and after the race. But it's all done in a friendly tone and at the end of the day we'll all have a good laugh and a brew. And thats the beauty of it. True sportsmanship.

My initial plan was to only make one pit stop to refuel so I wouldn't waste to much time standing still but an hour into the race I started to feel the fact that my cardio isn't at its peak right now. (Which is according to plan since I'm planning on peaking in March when the Tuareg Rally will take place) So I decided that I would make two stops so I could fuel my body as well as the bike. At this point I was holding a pace that allowed me to do three laps in an hour.

The second hour went on pretty well but I started to get really tired at the end of my sixth lap when I went in for my second refuel. At least I was still keeping the pace of three laps an hour. I refueled, washed down a piece of a FlapJack with some water, told myself I could rest some other day, and rolled out for my third hour. By now my grip was suffering and it felt like I was riding at a painfully slow pace. Barely able to stay on the track sometimes.

I managed to get 9 laps in three hours and finished at ninth place out of 18 riders in the solo class and looking at the lap times it seems I was able to hold a steady pace throughout the race. Despite how slow it felt that I was riding and the end of the race. The day after I felt at least 10 years older when I woke up with pretty much every muscle in my body being sore. Luckily it wore off pretty quickly.

Lap times:

Lap 1: 0:19:27 (9)
Lap 2: 0:20:20 (8)
Lap 3: 0:21:20 (9)
Lap 4: 0:23:54 (9)
Lap 5: 0:22:42 (8)
Lap 6: 0:23:19 (8)
Lap 7: 0:27:25 (9)
Lap 8: 0:23:00 (9)
Lap 9: 0:23:10 (9)
Total:  3:24:37 (9)

All in all it was a good race and very well organized, and a perfect opportunity to get a lot of riding time and a good workout. Getting a lot of riding time is probably one of the best thing you can do in preparation for a rally. Feeling comfortable in the saddle and being able to drive fast and intuitively while still being relaxed will save you a lot of energy. When you're racing for one or two weeks you have to household with your strength and riding safe, smart, and effortless will get you a long way in a rally raid event.