Castera plots roadmap for Dakar success

The Frenchman would be the 12-stage race director that will see 778 competitors

BISHAM:

David Castera is of an age to have experienced the Dakar Rally in Africa and South America so who better than the Frenchman to be the race director, responsible for sketching out the race route in Saudi Arabia.

It is a Herculean task that will provide an equally testing challenge for the 434-strong caravan made up of cars, bikes, quads and trucks that set out in Bisha, in the southwest of Saudi Arabia, for Friday's opening prologue.

Twelve stages over 8,000 kilometres await the 778 competitors from 72 countries before a January 17 finish in Shubaytah, on the border of the United Arab Emirates.

And the man at the centre of it all is Castera who, as co-driver to Cyril Despres, finished third in the 2017 edition of the most famous endurance rally in the world.

The 54-year-old, who hails from the south-west of France close to the Pyrenees, is not one to bathe in the glory of a race just run.

The calendar had just ticked into February -- only a couple of weeks after the end of last year's event -- when he opened his laptop and pored over Google Earth for hours on end, eyeing up the potential route for the 2025 edition.

He traces lines on the maps of endless miles of desert and sand dunes where he believes motorbikes, trucks and cars can safely traverse the challenging terrain.

"I spend whole evenings, nights even, tracing, writing, trying to work out the forward areas," he told AFP at the bivouac camp at Bisha.

Castera, who was appointed to his post in March 2019 and was in charge when the Rally switched from South America to Saudi for the 2020 renewal, tries to mix it up.

There are routes posing technical challenges and other stages where the competitors are at liberty to lean full throttle on the accelerator.

He pinpoints climbs and descents, and searches for a good dose of rocks in a bid to create a multi-faceted course for the prologue and 12 stages that follow.