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Marc Van Der Aa & Luis Medina photos
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Marc van der Aa
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Marc van der Aa
Campbell tackles a water crossing in the first stage. The untested Durango would soon have its AC let go.
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Marc Van Der Aa & Luis Medina photos
After a bad day, your starting position plummets for the next day, meaning Campbell had to race vehicles much slower than him at times.
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Marc van der Aa
The Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth, rain hasn’t fallen here for centuries and temperatures reach 50-degrees Celsius. With no AC or cooling, the Durango would reach 69-degrees Celsius inside.
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Marc Van Der Aa & Luis Medina photos
Another challenge was the fine talcum powder-like sand that was at times a metre deep.
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Ruben Anders
Matt Campbell in his unique office with co-driver Luis Ramirez and navigator Nicolas Ambriz, both of Mexico.
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Marc van der Aa
Despite the challenges, Campbell finished his first Dakar second in the OP1 Class.
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Marc Van Der Aa & Luis Medina photos
Campbell in search of the elusive waypoints.
By Budd Stanley, Photos by Marc Van Der Aa and Luis Medina
Last issue, we put together quite a feature on the iconic Dakar Rally, the epic annual event that see’s hundreds of riders, car and truck pilots take to the deserts of South America in search of the most prestigious prize in off-road racing. While we concentrated on the top end of the field, there were two Canucks also in attendance, fighting for class wins and the personal satisfaction of surviving one of the world's most dangerous motorsports events.
While Quebec’s David Bensadoun was forced to retire mid-way through the rally with technical trouble, Alberta’s Matt Campbell persevered through to the end to capture not just his first finish, but also second place in the OP1 Class. With Matt back home in Calgary, we had a chance to have a chat with Canada’s second-only Dakar finisher in the Car Class, to discuss his unique tactics, the machinery he had built and how he survived the treacherous event.
4WD: Hello Matt, for those who maybe don’t know you, can you tell us a little about yourself?
MC: Well I grew up Thompson, Manitoba, and worked for my fathers business. At the time, we were taking on the British Leyland and Volvo franchises. In my younger years I raced Minis, but then I finally figured out you don’t make money in the car business if the mechanics are always working on the racecars. I came to the assessment that, do I want to become a businessman or do you want to be a broke ass racer. So, I gave up racing and moved to Saskatoon for a little over a decade, then came to Calgary and bought the Case construction equipment stores and began to grow the business.
4WD: So what got you back into motorsports?
MC: I’ve been traveling to Cabo San Lucas for thirty years; I really like the fishing down there. Well as you know, there is a real off-road racing cult down there, and I started hanging around it a bit. Then a neighbour talked me into entering a race in a Class 15 RZR of all things. We did well finishing second, but you know, eating dust and the bloody thing was so slow, we upgraded to a faster car. Then that wasn’t fast enough, so we bough a Class 1 race package from the late Steve Appleton and started racing Baja. Well, as everyone knows, Dakar is the holly grail of off-road racing, so we made the decision last year to take a run at it.
4WD: What does it take to prepare for and finish the Dakar Rally?
MC: If you don’t have it your not going to make it, you either have it or you don’t. Day after day after day, its like running a Baja 500 14-days in a row, and if you don’t have the mental fortitude to push through the $#!%, you’re just not going to make it.
In my business, I say you can change a guy by about 15-percent through motivation or yelling at him, but if you don’t have that tenacity, the Dakar will eat you up. I also had a real good exercise regime and dropped 25-pounds and even quit drinking three months before the race. So, I made a big personal commitment as well as the whole team.
4WD: Tell us about the Durango you competed with?
MC: So I got Jimco to design and build a three-seat car. I’m no spring chicken so I wanted a co-driver along with the navigator. Jimco did a good job, we only had six months to build and ship it to Argentina for the race. Its similar to the Class 1 I race in Baja, rear engine mid mount transaxle but it runs a clutch instead of a torque converter. We got comments that the car was too big or too slow, what have you. You have all sorts of requirements for these cars and we ran a 7.6L RHS V-8 engine, but we had to have a 27 mm air restrictor. So, we had a six-inch intake shrink down to 27 mm then back to five-inches at the throttle body, that kills your power. We dynoed it at 700 hp without the restrictor and 320 hp with the restrictor, so that’s how much it cuts your power. The sanctioning body has all sorts of formulas for all the different cars like the diesels. They do give the diesels an advantage, but they are working hard to make the North American cars more competitive and attract more competitors.
4WD: Now that you completed the rally, is there anything you would have changed?
MC: Well, we decided that we wouldn’t run the onboard adjustable tire pressure because they were mechanical and not the most reliable. So, we would get to the sand dunes and we’d have six or eight cars blow by honking and waving because they were doing it all from the cab. Well, we’d get to the end of the dunes and air the tires up again, and another six or eight guys would blow by honking and waving. So next year we’ll be sure to mount the in cab systems. As for the engines, our biggest issue was we were burning a lot of fuel. We were burning sometimes three or four times what the diesel guys were burning. But you know, we’ll get the engine back and strip it down and I bet it looks brand new in there. We had no issues what so ever. So, it might be a case of run with what you know.
4WD: What is life like on the Dakar?
MC: The people in Argentina have really gotten behind the event. I tell you, it’s amazing to take that start ramp and there are hundreds of thousands of people cheering for you the whole way through the city, out in the stages and they circle the bivouacs.
4WD: What were the biggest challenges of the Dakar?
MC: The first day we had the AC crap out and it was 50-degrees when we were out in the desert in a sealed car, this was brutal. We were laughing, in the 1800’s no miner would put up with what we had to go through. One day the onboard thermometer read 137-degree F. The other thing is the fine sand. You go through hundreds of miles of talcum powder type sand, the stuff so fine and deep it would come right over the windshield. We were driving through three or four feet of the stuff. Just driving through the sand dunes was hard. Now, a lot of people don’t understand the dunes, ah they’re just dunes, but what they don’t know is that the organizers go out the night before and burry way points out in the middle of hundreds of square miles of dunes. All we have is a route book given to us the morning before the stage and a trip-meter to find these waypoints. And they stick them in the most ignorant spots, so if you miss a waypoint you get a three-hour penalty. This is why you see all these cars driving around in circles stuck in the dunes, because we’re trying to find all the waypoints.
4WD: What goes through your mind with only a few stages left?
MC: Well just don’t f#$k it up, and here’s an example. A car went by us like a bat out of hell, and we thought what’s the rush. Well, we came around the corner and there he is on his lid. He wrecked the car and broke both his legs. Four km from the finish and this guy went out like that, four km out of 8,000. I was actually in pretty good shape. It was quite the accomplishment. The thing I like about it is you are with the best racers in the world, and we never got much credit at first, but come the last days, the best guys in the world, world champions in all sorts of fields, were coming up and chatting with me and congratulating me for finishing. You need a reliable car and to finish every stage, and if you do that, then you will have a decent showing, meaning you will finish. You try to go as quick as you can, but just don’t wreck the car.
4WD: A television screen can only tell you so much, what about the Dakar rally that people don’t see?
MC: You have no pre-run, which is the big difference between Baja and Dakar. You know when to go like hell and when to take it easy. But in Dakar, you don’t have that same degree of control. A good bush driver will do all right, because you need to read the road for the most part.
4WD: Now that you have successfully completed your first Dakar, what’s next for you?
MC: Well we will run the Dakar again. We’ll make some changes to the car; utilize what we learned in this year’s event. We now have a lot more experience so we have a better idea of what we need to do. To get into the top 30, its not hp that will get you there, its reliability. My plan is to have the Durango ready to go for the NORRA Mexican 1000 from Ensenada down to Cabo, and I will also race half the Class 1 circuit in Baja.