PARIS TO DAKAR : Top Off-Road Racer Wants to Try It Again

Malcolm Smith thought for a moment, smiling as always, as he pondered the question. He had just arrived home after driving at least 8,500 miles in the Paris-to-Dakar rally, 22 days across the mostly uncharted western part of Africa, zigzagging through the heartland of the Sahara Desert.

“Go back? You bet I would,” Smith said. “I would like to see improvement in the safety regulations, but I’d go back in a second. I hope to be there again in 1989.”

Smith, the star of “On Any Sunday” and nonpareil of American off-road racers, finished fourth driving a Range Rover in his first Paris-to-Dakar effort. He has driven--and won--in Baja California, in the East African Safari, in the Mint 400 outside of Las Vegas, and in nearly every country that motorcycles are raced, but he says the experience of Paris-Dakar is like nothing else.

“It’s like racing the Baja 1000, and then doing it again for 21 straight days,” Smith said. “No, it’s different from that. In Baja, no matter how desolate it appears, you are never far from some vestige of civilization, even if it’s only an abandoned car or grazing horse.

“There were some places out in the Sahara where we went 400 miles without seeing anything. I mean absolutely nothing. No people, no wells, no abandoned anything. Not even an old truck trail.

“You followed camel trails, and if you didn’t get there soon after they’d been there, the tracks were covered by drifting sand. I don’t know how the camel masters find their way. If we hadn’t had a compass, we’d still be out there wandering around.”

Juha Kankkunen, the world rally champion from Finland, won in a Peugeot 205, followed by Ken Shinozuka, an advertising executive from Japan, in a Mitsubishi. Formula One racer Patrick Tambay of France, one of Smith’s Range Rover teammates, was third. Fifth, in another Range Rover, was Gerard Miller of Kenya.

Rules of the Paris-Dakar differ from those of Baja, or the Mint, where drivers share the wheel in a vehicle. When Smith won his many championships, he usually took turns driving with Dr. Bud Feldkamp, a Riverside dentist. In the Sahara, the designated driver does it all. The passenger, in Smith’s case a Belgian motorcyclist named Alain Fieuw, does the navigating and helps mechanically when the vehicle breaks down. Or gets stuck in the sand.

“It’s like being married for 22 days,” Smith said with a grin. “There are a lot of disagreements and arguments, but if you don’t get along, you’re going to be in deep trouble.”

The two things that Smith remembers best are getting stuck and getting lost.

“We got stuck in the sand 10 times,” he said. “The sand is funny over there. Sometimes if you slowed down, you’d immediately start sinking, but other times you could be hauling along at racing speed and suddenly, just as if you’d hit the brakes, you’d be stopped, and stuck.

“There was often no warning. The color, the texture of the sand or the shape of the dune wouldn’t change, but suddenly you’d be in this funny sand. As many times as I’ve been stuck in Baja or the Mint, I’ve never seen anything like this.

“All you can do is stop, get out the air bag and dig enough room for it to squeeze underneath the car. Sometimes when you step out, you sink in almost to your knees. It’s as fine as talcum. You blow the air bag up with air from the exhaust until the wheels clear the ground, and you can get the grip boards under the tires. All this can take a half hour or longer, and there’s no guarantee that when you rev up and gun away that the six feet of grip boards is going to keep you going.”

One of the strange sights of the 22-day odyssey was seeing four or five vehicles circling around a checkpoint, afraid to stop but unable to continue before getting their rally card stamped.

“Guys would drive slowly around, holding their card against the window, trying to get it stamped, but if the checker missed, they’d have to circle around again. You had to go fast enough to keep from sinking, but slow enough so you could get stamped. It got real crazy in some places.”

Smith lost six hours and drove an estimated additional 200 miles while trying to find the right route.

“The time we lost was the difference between fourth and second,” he said. “Part of the intrigue was that 40% of the course was on virgin terrain, without any tracks or trail. Everyone received a route book, but when the sand blew, and it seemed to be blowing all the time, the course markings would change, or disappear altogether.

“Even with our compass settings, we kept getting lost. Alain had ridden a motorcycle in six previous Paris-Dakar rallies, but that didn’t help much. It’s very different riding a bike where you can see all around you and trying to navigate a car or truck where you can only see straight ahead.

“At first, when we came to a puzzling position, I would want to go one way, and Alain would want to go the other, and we never seemed to make the right choice. One time he would be right, and maybe the next time I would be right, but in the meantime we had to retrace our route. Sometimes, in Baja, you can make a mistake and take a shortcut back to the road, but in the Sahara that can get you farther off because there’s no road to return to most of the time.”

Once, while wandering around Mali looking for a landmark, Tambay ran across a camel herdsman who said they had crossed the border and were in Algeria.

“He said he would lead them back, so Patrick had him sit on his navigator’s lap while he led them through a mountain pass and back to a village where we were all stopped. Tambay tried to pay him with Algerian money, but the guy wanted French francs so he ended up getting about 600 francs (about $100) for guiding Tambay about 10 miles.”

Another expensive item is gasoline. At one desolate place in Mali, about 600 miles from the legendary Timbuktu, Smith paid $1,200 in U.S. currency, for 100 gallons of gas.

“That was just one fill-up because we carry two 55-gallon drums. Sometimes we have to make 900 kilometers (about 600 miles) between fuel stops. That one was at the former penal colony of Kidal that is now a salt mine. When it was a prison, there was no need for bars or fences to keep the prisoners in because it was so far from anywhere that they weren’t necessary. They just dropped the prisoners off and that was it.”

Once, while wandering around looking for a landmark, Malcolm and Alain came upon a new-born white camel, standing shakily alongside its mother.

“That was really nice,” Smith said. “It almost made all our frustrations worthwhile. We saw a lot of wild camel herds, sometimes between 100 and 150 of them, just running wild in the dunes.”

Another time, after camping at a one-time NATO landing strip near Tessalit, Mali, Smith tried to contact his wife in Riverside from the communications plane. When he heard the answering machine, Malcolm said: “Darling, I’m ringing you from the middle of nowhere.”

The caravan of more than 600 vehicles left Paris to the cheers of more than 300,000 fans early on Jan. 1. After ferrying to Algiers, the rally crossed the North and West African countries of Algeria, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal to finish on the shores of the crimson-colored Lac Rose, about 15 miles north of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. By Jan. 22, the competitors had dwindled to 33 motorcycles and 100 cars and trucks.

“The negative things you hear about the rally are the injuries and the deaths, and that is regrettable,” Smith said. “The safety features are almost nonexistent, compared to what we have in SCORE (the Southern California-based off-road ruling body), and the villages are full of people who haven’t the slightest idea what to expect.

“On most stages, we camp on one side of a village, drive slowly through it in the morning and start racing on the other side, but even then the little children swarm around the cars with little idea they might get hit. There is so much dust behind the cars that when one passes, children dart across the road not knowing that another vehicle may be right behind. Sometimes they stand so close to the road you don’t think you can miss them. In such cases, I drop down a gear. To my mind, it’s better to drop a minute or so than to cause such a tragic accident to innocent bystanders who don’t necessarily understand what rallying is all about.

Six people, including three spectators, were killed during the 22 days.

“When I decided to enter, I set two goals for myself, Smith said. “First was personal survival. Second was not to hurt anyone else. I managed to accomplish both, but there were some guys out there, racers and guys in the press vans, who disengaged their brain.”

Some of the negative attitude, Smith believes, was offset by the financial windfall that befell the native populations.

“As many people as were involved--the competitors, the support teams, the mechanics, the media, the officials--there was a lot of money thrown around. A lot went for fuel, a lot for food, a lot for help and advice out in the desert. Each day the organizers gave us a lunch. Usually, we’d eat about half and give the rest to the children. There were children everywhere you looked. You’d no sooner stop than your car would be surrounded. Most of the crews took along a change of clothes for every day and usually when they changed, they gave away what they took off to the young boys.

“Another strange thing that happened to me is that nearly every place we stopped, at a village or some remote watering hole, some American would come up and greet me. They were missionaries, or Peace Corps workers or tourists on a camel caravan, but somehow they heard an American was in the rally so they dropped in to visit. It was real interesting talking with them.”

Each vehicle was equipped with a survival kit, including a locater beacon and flares.

“Africa is a very remote part of the world and when you’re out in the desert, you respect it. At least I did. One motorcycle rider didn’t take his survival kit because he said it weighed too much, and when he got lost it took the organizers three days to find him.

“I wouldn’t race a motorcycle out there. There are too many high-speed looking places where you can end up in disaster.”

One motorcyclist was killed, and another, two-time world motocross champion Andre Malherbe of Belgium, suffered a broken neck and is paralyzed from the neck down.

Smith, secure in the confines of the Range Rover cab, had a frightening experience on the 19th day, between Kayes-Kaffi and Moujeria in Mauritania.

“I was running pretty hard when we suddenly came across a great big hole in the road. There was no way I was going to brake in time, so I accelerated as hard as I could and just managed to clear it. Alain (his navigator) gave out a cheer when we hit the other side, but Patrick (Tambay) was not so lucky. He was right behind me and crashed pretty hard. Those Range Rovers are built awfully strong because the way he hit would have wiped out most Baja equipment.”

A team of Toyota Land Cruisers stopped and helped pull Tambay from the ditch and get him going again.

“There is one thing about racing in the Sahara,” Smith said. “There is no such thing as every man for himself. It’s not so much man against man, but man against the elements. Everyone helps each other. If they didn’t, the desert would beat us all.”