Five minutes to plan for 400 miles

Also among rallying's unsung heroes are co-drivers - more so on the Dakar than anywhere else, discovers Piers Ward

- Piers Ward

"You wake up, you get shaken around all day and you go to bed." As far as job descriptions go, it's nothing if not to the point. The speaker is Dennis Murphy, co-driver to Giniel de Villiers in car # 205, and it's fair to say that he ticks most of the South African clichés of a wadi-dry wit.

If the mechanics are the unsung heroes of the Dakar, the navigators run them a close second, having a level of responsibility that can mean the difference between a win and a retirement.

Park all your preconceptions about co-drivers in the World Rally Championship. Each stage in the Dakar is longer than an entire WRC event, and every single one of those stages is a step into the absolute unknown.  They get no reconnaissance runs, no maps and no satellite images - instead, just a series of organiser-supplied route notes five minutes ahead of the off, a 900,000-square-mile desert and only a rough idea about where to head.

Five minutes to plan a 400-mile route across virgin desert. To most people, those five minutes would be panic central, with all sorts of Corporal Jones moments and plenty of flapping. But Murphy isn't most people.

"We get the road book beamed into our display screen, wait five minutes and then the bouncing starts," he says. "I check for speed zones [where the speed is restricted around hazards like animals or houses], but I don't go through the book. There's way too much information. So I scan the first 10 pages, trying to work out what sort of terrain it will be, and then get ready."

Weirdly, the navigators prefer this lack of preparation. Previously, road notes were handed out the night before, so teams would spend hours trying to work out the best route. With this new method, sleep is easier to come by.