Euromilhões Lisboa - Dakar 2007 : Dakar

Jan De Rooy: “We run for a podium”

This year Jan De Rooy will finally experience the relaxed rhythm of Portuguese life of which he only caught a glimpse last year. As expected before arriving in Lisbon, his participation on the 2006 Dakar was thwarted and ended up with a stormy return home after the blue trucks were not approved by the international Federation. The driving Dutchman and his team learned their lesson from this failed attempt and used this last year to solve their compliance issues with the trucks. “This is a new De Rooy coming to the start of the rally”, declares the head of the family. Last year’s incident belongs to the past now. We are back here to accomplish something”. So this team has come to the 29th Dakar with a renewed fighting spirit. And with very clear ambitions: “We run for a podium, for my son or for me. It doesn’t matter”, says Jan De Rooy. “We are very happy to be back on this African race. We have a great truck and I think there is not only one favourite, since there are several trucks that are able to win this race. The title will be well disputed”.

64-year-old Jan De Rooy is considered the “last of the Mohicans” on the Dakar, i.e. one of the last competitors from the generation of Thierry Sabine. The Dutchman, who owns an international transports company, first competed on the Dakar in 1981 with very good results. In this rally he has had moments of glory but has also gone through hard times. This entrepreneur from Son, in the Netherlands, has always borne the colours of DAF, the Dutch national manufacturer. His progression was steady and finally crowned with a victory in 1987. This victory could have come with a scratch time, before all the cars, if he had not been hit by a 10-hour penalty after going to rescue Vatanen who finally won that year!

Jan De Rooy is better known for the excessive size of his monsters than for his successes on the piste, to the extent that Jan was even nicknamed “Mad Max”. So, with their two double turbo engines of 500 HP each, two 8 speed gear boxes with simultaneous commands and two driving axles, his famous DAF TurboTwins were able to compete with the fastest cars. But the Dutchman gave up this endless desire for more overnight and withdrew his team from the 1988 edition after his prototype had an accident and his navigator died. It took 14 years before Jean De Rooy could overcome this tragedy and he finally came back to the Dakar in 2002. Gerard, his son, now races with Jean. He started in the same cockpit as his father and then got his own truck. Since his come-back, Jean has only reached the podium once.

moto

David Frétigné: « Manage a smart race »

Naïm Suleymanoglu, 1,47m, 50 world records and triple Olympic champion in weightlifting. Kajsa Bergqvist, 1,75m, world indoor record holder in high jump (2,08m) and World champion of the discipline. David Frétigné’s battle is quite similar. In a discipline where mechanical factors are decisive, he chose difficulty: to go faster than the others with a less powerful bike. While the KTM bikes of Coma, Despres and the others are equipped with 660cc engines, it is with a 450cc Yamaha that the native from the Aveyron area of France battles it out in the Dakar with quite some success in the last three years.

5th of the final overall standing in 2005, Frétigné lived a more difficult and eventful race in 2006. Enough to boost this born competitor who had established a coherent program for the 2007 Dakar: “I had signed a contract with a Spanish sponsor but I received an e-mail in October telling me that I couldn’t count on them any more. I was devastated but it was out of the question to remain at home in January. In three weeks, I managed to set up a solid project and I am now reassured to be able to leave in good conditions’’.

Good conditions mean a solid assistance structure, reliable sponsors and still a 450cc Yamaha on which he can found a lot of hope despite the difference of calibre: “On paper, one can’t win with a 450cc. But I still hope to aim for the podium. There is still a way of managing a smart race. I think that the stages with no assistance for example, will require a lot of efforts in terms of management and strategy. It is in these domains that one can make a difference”. A philosophy that Naïm, the pocket Herculis or flying Kajsa would certainly have applied at the best moment of their careers.

Kleinschmidt: “True professionals and a great atmosphere”

Jutta Kleinschmidt’s name will be forever etched in the history of the Dakar as the first woman to have equalled men in the desert: the first to win a stage in 1997, the first to reach the podium in 1999 and, of course, the first to win the rally in 2001. This steady progression says a lot about the unusual determination and willpower of the German driver. After being the “cornerstone” of Volkswagen in rally raid, she is now racing for BMW. This new start is providing her with new sensations and a renewed enthusiasm: “This is a smaller team but they are true professionals and there is a great atmosphere”. This change has been like a new start in Jutta’s life. She has quickly made herself at home in her new team and has found the right settings for her new X3. The Rally of Dubai, where she had a good race and finished 6th, enabled her to test the capacity of her new car. Finally, during the first week-end of December she has had the opportunity for further fine-tuning during the last tests in Germany.

The German driver does not hide her ambitions and simply comments: “I am very motivated”. Jutta likes competing and such a declaration leaves no doubts about her state of mind. Her will to do well is confirmed by the presence of Tina Thörner as her co-driver. The latter already sat next to Jutta in 1999 when they finished 3rd in the Dakar and she comments enthusiastically: “I wanted to finish my career after my second position in the Dakar last year with Giniel de Villiers. But Jutta came looking for me. We have the same team as a few years ago and it is very exciting”.

Etienne, Régis & François Vulliet: “We ride together, we finish together”

Three brothers from Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps: Etienne, 40 years old, Régis 38 and François 34. One same dream since childhood: the Dakar! “When I was 14, we already went to Marseille to see the participants of the Dakar board the ferry on January 1st. We looked at the great desert riders, Cyril Neveu and Gaston Rahier… They were the ones who gave us our taste for overcoming challenges”, explains the youngest of the three brothers, François, who is now an entrepreneur that has been living in Timisoara, Romania, for ten years. Last year François took part with Roméo Dunca, the first Romanian on the Dakar who also has completed the race (79th).

This year, the three brothers made up their own team in order to cross the finish line. They called it Pulse Compet. It is the first time three brothers will race together on this rally. Besides, nobody from Haute-Savoie, France, has ever reached the Pink Lake (Retba). So if one of them arrives… But Etienne, the eldest, prefers to opt for a more modest tune: “We have no particular objective for the overall standing. We ride together, we finish together. This is what we want”.

The least we can say is that the brothers have left nothing to chance. In October, the trio spent a week in Ksar-Ghilane, in Tunisia, in the most Saharan of oases, right at the gates of the desert. No power, no phone, only one spot with hot water to take a relaxing bath every evening. The training sessions prepared by Etienne were quite intense: they left every morning at dawn and came back to the camp at sunset. The programme: sand, sand and more sand. Everything one needs to prepare the 2007 edition.

Etienne Vulliet has designed the race strategy: “I think the Dakar follows a process of elimination. It is very important to ride at your own pace, to avoid overconfidence and to take advantage of the possible mistakes of other competitors, in order to improve your ranking. But for me this rally is not really a race. What really draws me is the extreme side of it: the adrenaline and the challenge. This is of course an adventure I want to share with my brothers”. Etienne, Régis and Fabrice dream of arriving together in Dakar and of entering hand in hand in the legend of the rally.

Miguel Jonchère: “Mobile surgery”

Last year, Miguel Jonchère left his co-driver’s seat for the driver’s as he could not resist any longer staying away from the pedals and the steering wheel. He enjoyed being a driver and decided to repeat the experience this year. This time he will have a new co-driver at his side: Bruno Seillet. Jonchière completed the feat last year of finishing his first Dakar (67th). Miguel has a passion for Africa and decided that his adventure should also benefit the two humanitarian associations he is involved with: Entraide sans frontiers (an ambulatory medical service) and AJIR Aventure (a social association that works with young people).

“I am very attached to Africa. Besides the Dakar, I spend two weeks in Africa every year with the association Entraide sans Frontière… It is what we call a medical caravan, i.e. we go with physicians and nurses and provide mobile surgery services”, explains Bruno Seillet. This work is also done in collaboration with local doctors who refer to us the patients who need us the most.

Bruno is also the manager of a service company and seizes the opportunity of the Dakar to support another humanitarian action. “I am in charge of a second association that helps the youth: it’s called AJIR Aventure”, he explains. This association collects shoes, clothes, etc. and redistributes everything in the poorest African countries. Bruno Seillet saw right away an opportunity to do something: “AJIR could benefit from my participation in 2006. I noted down the names of the places where people were the worst-off and we went back there afterwards. This year I am going to use my presence on the Dakar again to locate new places”. Thanks to the rally, Bruno can in fact discover places that have been abandoned, far from the tourist pools where the visitors are already asked to contribute. “I have seen places in Africa where people run away when they see you, where children start to cry. This is where we try to go back. This man makes it a point of honour before concluding philosophically: “It is nice to drive through a village, but it much better when you go back and see how things are going”.