Dakar time differences between classes...

[Chris Tobin]

Am I the only one who noticed the huge time differences between the classes???

Carlos won the "Car" class with an overall time of 47:10:00 putting together a truly amazingly fast time!!!

The winning time in the "Bike" class was 51:10:37 or 4-hours slower than the winning car!!! That is a huge amount of time.

The winning time for the "Truck" class was 55:04:47 or almost 8-hours slower than the cars and this is expected, but why were the bikes so much slower than the Cars???

Finally the "Quad" class winner finished the rally in 64:17:44 over 17-hours slower than the "Cars", over 13-hours slower than the "Bikes" and over 9-hours slower than the "Trucks"...

Why were the "Bikes" slower than the "Cars" are the Dakar "Cars" that much faster than the "Bikes" or is this the result of the restrictor on the 690 bikes or what??? And how are the "Trucks" almost as fast as the "Bikes" and finally why were the "Quads" so much slower than everyone else??? I would think that the quads would get stuck less in the dunes and they would have similar speed to the bikes in the wide open sections so why so much slower???

Is this the way the ASO wants the finishes or will we see more restrictions on the "Cars" and "Trucks" in future Dakar's???

Enquiring minds want to know???

What's your opinion of the timing differences?

[SPONSOR]

Membership in the largest desert racing community has its advantages - Participate in Forum Discussions - Send and Receive Private Messages - Maintain Public Photo Albums - Access to Groups - User Profile in our Social Network - Increased Access to more Sub Forums - Reduced Online Advertisements Join our community today

[Offspring]

Maybe by design? Chances of great injury/death are much higher on bike/quad and they wanted them to be slower. But it looks like there might have been more mixing of the car/trucks with the bike/quads with these results, which can't be that good. Bottom line, I think the course was much more technical than last years, is it where the ASO wanted it? We'll see with next years course, rule changes etc.

[randy s]

didn't the bikes run a little different course in the early stages? i thought i heard something about that. could be wrong. it's happened before. ja ja.

[Chase 2]

The ASO did purposefully make the course more technical in order to slow the bikes down. The question is why were they slower than the cars. Most of the time the more technical the course the is, the faster the bikes are than the cars because they can accelerate and decelerate better than the cars. I would love to hear Mark Miller's opinion as he's races these things in cars and on bikes.

[Dirty Harry]

The bikes go ahead of the cars so the line is burned in by the time the cars come through. Plus the cars have a guy who gets to navigate full time without having to worry about going over the bars or looking at the ground while he reads the road book. Bike guys don't have that luxury.

[Chase 2]

The bikes go ahead of the cars so the line is burned in by the time the cars come through. Plus the cars have a guy who gets to navigate full time without having to worry about going over the bars or looking at the ground while he reads the road book. Bike guys don't have that luxury.

I totally agree, but it is a mistake for the car guys to use the same lines as the bikes. With out looking back there was at least one stage that the bikes had a different route early in the event.

[Dirty Harry]

I totally agree, but it is a mistake for the car guys to use the same lines as the bikes. With out looking back there was at least one stage that the bikes had a different route early in the event.

The bike guys used a different route on the first two stages, but that was for their own safety. Those stages were super fast on graded roads and not really much of a challenge for navigation.

You are right though, there were plenty of times where the car guys found faster lines than the bike guys, or the track was so chewed up they had to find an alternate route.

[ZequeArgentina]

I would also add how though competition was.
At the cars, the pace was fast all race long, the leaders were always very close.
At the trucks and Quads, differneces were too big, no competition to theleaders, and second and positins was a teammate who was not suppossed to fight for the lead.

In the Quads is was very clear, times comapred to bikes were much faster in earl days, then the Patronelli brothers trailled together, waited fo the other a every stage, and commented they were just letting the stages pass by.

Anyway, I would also have expeted the bikes to be faster, we shold probably need to analize da by day.

By the way, I did not comment he second weeks, cause I trip to mendoza, hadsom holidays and watched the San Rafael (Stage 14) stage in the grey dunes. Really amussing, people was crazy about the hummers, with that suspenssion travel and engine noise, jumping ad floating over dunes were very nice to watch. VW and BMW were really fast putting the power to the sand almost all the time!!

Bikes looked like not taking any risks.