I know there are a few different races around the world that are long enough to take several days, like the Dakar rally (formerly the Paris Dakar rally).
How do they handle night/sleep time for the drivers?
The rally is broken up into day long stages. So you’re just racing against the clock a set distance per day, not unlike a normal rally except the stages are really long. At least back in the old days, there were just “bivouacs” between stages where everyone camped, but I don’t know how much camping goes on in the South American version of the race these days.
I saw a documentary about racing when I was a kid. It had Dean Jones and Buddy Hackett as a driving team. In their multi day race they recorded the arrival times at each check point, then the next morning each car was allowed to leave at the same relative time as their arrival. So if you arrived 30 minutes after the first place car you had to wait 30 minutes after start time to leave the next day.
Awesome documentary BTW.
In this respect, it’s pretty much the same as the bicycling tours. Nobody expects either drivers or riders to go on continuously, it’s all done in stages and there may be stages which are shorter/less demanding than usual or even rest days so people have time to recover, do maintenance in somewhat less of a hurry, etc.
Thanks all. I was wondering how they kept things interesting for fans all along the route while letting drivers keep any lead they’ve built up. The staggered start time sounds like just the thing.
I was somehow under the impression that the checkpoint arrival times could be hours apart for the various cars (probably due to the old Laffalympics and speed racer cartoons).
Did a Volkswagen Beetle win that one?
It looked like one, but they just referred to it as “the little car”. It actually finished first AND third.
I used to work some rallies, but it’s been quite a while. For the special stages, the cars would start one minute apart; finish the stage and your time gets logged in a book (and also reported to race control). Then you drive to the next special stage (arriving at the correct time, not just as fast as possible). But at the beginning and middle of each day, the cars were sent out in the order of their accumulated time.
So, for a spectator standing by the side of the road, the first car to pass is (very probably) the overall leader. About a minute later, second place goes by. A minute after that, third, etc. The actual gap in the standings could be only a few seconds.
Well, when your stages might be 600 kilometers long, the participants will get pretty spread out. For the whole event you’d often see something like a 12 hour time difference in the top 10, and it could be days between the first and last finishers.
Plus there’s the issues of breakdowns. At least in the old Paris-Dakars, outside spare parts and mechanics weren’t allowed. You could get them from other participants though, so that’s the reason for the giant support trucks that are themselves also racing. So the drivers themselves had do to most of the repairs in the case of roadside breakdowns or else wait for a support truck. That could very easily put you many hours behind and it certainly wasn’t unheard of for drivers to have to keep racing straight through the night because of a breakdown.