116 WheelsMag.com.au
LIMBING Everest must feel like this.
Everyone in our team has serious doubts
about whether we’re going to make it, and
occasional fears that one of us might die.
And, to a large extent, factors beyond our
control might just laugh in the face of all
the hard graft and preparation it’s taken
for us to get here.
Plenty of people have laughed at us- uproariously in some cases – when we’ve
told them what we’re attempting. In a
moment of what can only be called inspired
stupidity, Wheels suggested to Mazda that
we should enter a standard BT-50 in an off-
road race so brutal that more than half the
entrants don’t finish, and those who do end
up urinating blood or in neck braces.
Whoever answered the phone at Mazda
that day was clearly licking the window
rather than looking out of it, because they
were crazy enough to say yes and from there
things spiralled out of control to the point
where 16 of us are assembled in Alice Springs, shaking
our heads in awe at driver Toby Hagon’s announcement
that he hasn’t downed a single beer in a week.
While all of us admire his dedication, we also share
a silent terror that this is not going to end well. The
stakes for Mazda are high when you think about it. If
the car, entered in the Production Class in virtually
stock form (aside from new shocks, off-road tyres, a roll
cage and race seats), makes it to the end it will be a
story to stand alongside that unbreakable Toyota Hilux
that Top Gear couldn’t kill. But if it breaks down, or is
too slow to reach the checkpoints in the minimum time,
it will look like a total failure. And some horrible prick
from Wheels is here to write about it.
For Hagon, of course, only his spine, internal organs
and possibly life are in peril. And his pride, of course.
Welcome, then, to the Finke Desert Race; breaker of
cars, bikes, bones, teeth and hearts since 1976.IT’S not really possible to explain to someone what
riding a rollercoaster is like. You have to experience it
for yourself. And despite the efforts of several people
to describe the FDR track – which batters its way
some 226km from Alice Springs to Finke, a remote
Aboriginal community where the ground is so red you’d
think it was sunburnt – neither Hagon nor I have any
genuine idea what he’s in for.
When we first meet up in Alice, Toby has the kind of
thousand-yard stare you normally only see on the face
of a man whose woman has forced him to sit through
The Notebook; a mixture of fear, revulsion and mirth. As
he tries to describe the surface, and particularly the
giant sand dunes, he keeps making movements with his
hands that seem to describe a dolphin leaping through
water. It’s perhaps the best way to picture what the
trucks go through.
“I genuinely just laughed out loud when I first saw
it,” he says. “I thought it had to be a joke; you’re telling
me we need to average 56km/h on this? We’ll be lucky
to even reach 56km/h.”