@wheelsaustralia 119
That’s the problem with the Finke track, which was
originally a service road for the Ghan railway and now
resembles the surface of Mars. There’s none of it that
a standard SUV couldn’t get through, at low speed, but
Team Wheels is supposed to race on it.
Hagon has only recently been acquainted with
the fact that he has to reach the first checkpoint at
Bundooma in just two hours and 15 minutes, and the
finish line two hours after that. Both of these seem
about as likely as Toby running the 100m in under
10 seconds, even if there’s a buffet at the other end.
He and co-driver Bernie Webb have been here doing
the maths, and a recce, for a few days, which is why he
knows exactly how fast he needs to go.
“It’s the only event I’ve ever seen where ‘rough’
means good. We’ll be flat over those bits, but from
there it goes to ‘bumpy’ and then ‘whoops’,” Toby
explains. Out here, ‘whoops’ doesn’t mean you’ve hit a
tree. It’s a strange and unique term for the big dunes,
which have been further graded in the pace notes as
small, medium, large, sharp, narrow and wide.
Hagon and I are bouncing along a rough track out of
Alice as he explains all this. I think he’s being a bit of
a whinger, until he points out that we’re on an access
road, which is packed on both sides with giant camps
bearing names like ‘Runamuc M8’, ‘Blood, Sweat and
Beers’ and the deeply honest ‘Camp Red Neck’. The
actual course is a nasty-looking red stain of sand, rocks
and evil to our right. Oh. Dear.
People are quite free to have a go on the track
themselves in the days before the event proper starts,
and Toby talks me into having a go at just one medium-
sized whoop, at 15km/h. The sensation of a rollercoaster
is what comes to mind, but it would have to be one that
came to a sudden crunching halt at the bottom of its
descent. Our landing produces gunshot cracks from the
suspension as it bottoms out and inspires me to wonder
how much I’ll miss Toby when he dies.
“So you can see the problem; if I hit these whoops
at speed, we’re going to wreck the car, but if we don’t,
we’ll never make the cut-off time, so...” Toby trails off
as I spit out some teeth.
We have a few hollow laughs about his chances
and then stop to talk to some of the fans, all of whom
holler when they see the Wheels stickers. There is much
interest in the insanity of our attempt, and plenty of
people suggest we’ll be lucky to drive out of sight.
Not far from ‘Camp David’, we find Jessel Macarthur,
an unlikely looking IT guy and local resident who was
never bothered with the Finke until a friend from
Darwin dragged him along eight years ago. He hasn’t
missed one since.
“I’m hooked,” he grins, offering us a ‘scone’ that
seems to be made of cement. “The race used to be a
lot more exciting because they let them all start close
together. Now they space them out more, to stop the
accidents. You used to see more crashes and cars flying
off into trees and stuff. That was great! I come for the
social side anyway. It’s about meeting up with people
who camp in the same place every year, and then at
night there’s the fireworks. Awesome.”
It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that in the Northern
Territory, where 130km/h is the speed limit except
when there’s no limit at all, you can still buy fireworks
and set them off without a degree in pyrotechnics.
It occurs to me that no one is going to get much
sleep, not even the drivers and riders who, if they’re
lucky enough to make it to Finke in one piece, have to
get up and race back again the next morning.THE race proper kicks off on Saturday morning with
the Prologue, a timed run around a non-threatening,
8km off-road course to determine starting positions
for the first leg of the race on Sunday.Finke is so brutal
that more than half
the entrants don’t finish