At precisely 7am on a crisp West Australian morning Todd Smith rolled off the line. With a 45 KM transit stage before the section actually got under way some of the riders chose to get rugged up and donned the warm weather gear. Warren Strange, who is no stranger (no pun intended) to the goldfields cold mornings, went one better and slipped some latex gloves over his riding gloves to keep the wind out. Before heading off from the competitive stage he would remove them and stuff them in a jacket pocket.
The competitors had a reasonably large area to cover today and some of it was tight and technical but there were plenty of fast sections as well.
AJ Roberts had a day he would like to forget when traveling at speed through one of the stages he was suddenly greeted by Todd Smith who had made a mistake reading his road book and managed to get lost. The two came together and AJ’s 2010 Safari was over as quickly as that. A broken wrist and a banged up bike were the result.
As I type this the riders are still crossing the finish line from Stage three on the first competitive day. So far Ben Grabham is in the lead overall with Honda’s Todd Smith second, just shy of 1 minute and 30 seconds behind. Rod Faggotter is currently in 3rd right around 3 minutes behind Todd.
Glenn Hoffmann’s, GHR Honda team owner, day didn’t even get started this morning when the buggy he was set to drive for this years Safari sustained a minor but event ending mechanical during yesterdays prologue.
Today’s journey was a long one leaving Southern Cross and heading to Leonora. Unfortunately due to the sheer KM’s covered and the route we had to take to get to Leonora we did not get to see much of the actual race action. With steady updates and information constantly coming from race officials we were kept in the loop as to the days happenings. The organization of this event is far and beyond what I expected or could have ever thought it would be.
The guys on the Adventure Tour which runs along side the Safari were having a great time and we got to catch up with them during the day. I will be uploading a short interview with a couple of these guys later this evening. Look for a link to this soon.
If anyone is interested in doing this next year make sure you drop me an email. Address listed below. There was an issue with links i provided yesterday so i will list them all below.
So far there really is not much more to report so until I have more info I will sign off, give you some links and also be sure to check out my photo’s by going to my flickr page.
Links: http://www.australasiansafari.com.au/ http://www.bikesales.com.au/ http://www.marathonrally.com/ http://australasiansafari.com.au/website/adventuretour.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/mxmaley51/ http://www.rallyresults.com.au/safari2010/ http://facebook.com/justin.maley or follow my TWITTER @maley51
Email is mxmaley51@gmail.com
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