Rally Pan Am

NEWS

January 15th, 2007

Stages 8 and 9 - The Marathon Stages

The rally has now gone through the second and final marathon stage, where the racers get no support from the assistance crews... Casey did awesome, finishing 33rd in Stage 8 and 29th in Stage 9... and is now in 33rd overall.

Steve LaRoza, Paul Broome, and Chris Jones are all in... Unfortunately, Klaus Pelzman did not make it through Stage 8, and has dropped out. The motorcycle race is down to 137 people, and more will drop out in coming days.. Hopefully our guys will stay in.

As for the assistance crew, we had a bit of adventure the last couple days. We had a 1000 miles of bad Mauritanian roads to drive in two days, and as we were setting off yesterday morning, we realized Charlie's truck had a bad oil leak. So 6 hours later, after fixing it at a mechanic's shop with hand tools.. we set off. We drove until midnight, slept in the desert, and woke up early to hit the road. Arriving at the bivouac in Nema this afternoon, we ended up doing the drive in 26 hours, with and 8 hour stop. Pretty good, considering the potholes, livestock in the road, and crazy local drivers. Incidentally, Charlie's truck is now working perfectly.

Niles and Robb have had colds since Lisbon, and Niles is pretty sure it's Monkey Pox. Robb is leaning more towards Avian Flu, but we'll see.

Charlie wants everyone to know.. he never believed the assistance crew worked harder than the riders, but he's takes that back now.

Also, a quick note of thanks to all the Riff Raff! Your support has been incredible, and we could not have done all that we have without you.

Finally, the organization just talked to Steve LaRoza and Niles... Niles has adopted Steve's bike, and the Dakar website is going to do a feature on Steve, talking about Niles helping him out. Look for it on the Dakar website Tuesday morning.

Tomorrow we stay here for another day while the riders do a loop out of here... then we head to Mali.