Dakar 2013 - Official Event Coverage - thank you ALL TeamF5, lurkers and posters!

[640 Armageddon]

[Brodovitch]

And, yes, we're off.

Good luck to Pyndon today, experience of a lifetime to be mixing it up in a stage with the factory boys

WP1 open in 25-30 minutes or so...?

[paulk46]

Originally Posted by 640 Armageddon

i hate those invisible keystrokes

[tserts]

Standing by for another extremely unproductive day...

[8340SU]

dakar com


Beyond the Top 10, the first rider is no unknown quantity: Kurt Caselli has already shone in this Dakar, taking a stage win in his first participation in the rally. The eleventh-placed rider only has 24" on Daniel Gouet's Honda and 41" on Alessandro Botturi's Husqvarna. Fourteenth-placed Hélder Rodrigues is still within striking distance, 4'52" down on the Italian. From the seventeenth place down, a group of underperforming big names is almost one hour down, led by Juan Pedrero García (+49'18"), whose 4'31" ahead of Frans Verhoeven de 4'31. The highly experienced South African Curtis Darryl lies nineteenth, 3'11" ahead of Norway's Pål Anders Ullevålseter and 3'57" ahead of Aussie Ben Grabham.

Down in twenty-fourth place, Paulo Gonçalves has paid a hefty price for his technical problems. Even though he's been clawing his way up again, he's still 1 h 41' down on the leader, but just 20 seconds behind KTM's Dutchman Henk Knuiman, Marc Coma's former teammate. Behind Gonçalves lies another KTM with Pole Jacek Czachor on it, 7 minutes down on the Portuguese rider. From the riders in this group, much is expected from Nîmes-born Michael Metge, who could still take his Yamaha to new heights in the 2013 Dakar.

Among the KTMs, Hondas and other Yamahas, Marc Guasch and his Gas-Gas female teammate Laia Sanz lie twenty-ninth and thirtieth, respectively. The enduro and trial world champion set herself reasonable goals after injuring her foot. Alain Duclos' new adventure with Sherco has been plagued by mishaps and he now lies in forty-third, just behind Joan Barreda, who's also far from where he should be. The rider from Saint-Médard had three very difficult stages which he finished beyond the one-hundredth place.

[drgunther]

As usual, here are todays TV schedules:

Stage 9
@ 17:40 (UTC/GMT) - France 4 (Le Dakar), 60 minutes
@ 18:15 (UTC/GMT) - Eurosport 1 (Live - interviews), ~30 minutes
@ 22:00 (UTC/GMT) - Eurosport 1 (Stage summary), ~30 minutes
@ 23:40 (UTC/GMT) - France 2 (Bivouac), ~30 minutes

(FYI: Eurosport UK listings seem to be in sync today with what will be broadcast through the streaming URL we use.)

[Deadly99]

GO!!! Pynd

[Flood]

Originally Posted by escuchamente

Hey Mods,

While we are on the rest day, can we re-evaluate what the Cliff Notes thread is for. The original notes page updated important news releases, stage results, penalty explanations, withdrawals, interviews, a link or two to videos and only a few photos if they went with one of the aforementioned items. The more to-business format allowed us to browse through the day's notes and get a feel for what was going on, quickly, instead of spending an hour or two reading the daily explosion of pages in the Official Event Coverage thread.

This year our cliff notes thread is nearly mirroring the Media Thread. Throwing all those photos (with no news/story behind them) into the cliff notes clutters up the thread. If you look at pages 23 back to 21 (for a short example), over half the content is linked directly from the media thread and some news is wedged in. A possible solution is to post when updates to the media thread have been made and provide a link to the updated Media Thread in lieu of 3/4 of a page worth of photos. In years past I believe it went something like this:
Stage X video uploaded to the media thread.
Stage X and Y Photos courtesy of WebVenture uploaded to media thread.
Interview after stage X, with Inmate Pyndon here.

I appreciate the work that goes into updating threads like the cliff notes and that it can be time consuming to find the most applicable content in the sea of the main and sub Dakar threads. I think the main idea that worked in past years was to keep the cliff notes as simple as possible and let the reader follow links or conduct a more refined search based off the concise information in the cliff notes.

Thanks,
E

Thank you for the feedback! It's great to hear something back.
Sorry I couldn't answer earlier, Packmule already shared his thoughts.

The CN thread is for those who generally can't follow the firehose and for those F5ers who have to take a day or 2 off and want to catch up. As such, some pics and videos are part of the info package, just like standings and news releases.

Updating the CN is a surprisingly big load of work. Often we can't update the thread in real time (and no one can sit at the screen for the whole stage for 2 weeks until Luis is in and the France4 and ES info bits are here).
Sifting through 20-40 pages copy-/pasting posts takes me about 1-1.5 hours of mindless zombie work, although I have a pretty good workflow with quicklinks and shortcuts.

There's just no time to go back and re-edit the project to see if the selection of posts and the mixture of news and media makes sense.

What's more, I haven't read the media thread in the last 3 Dakars. There's just no time. Often enough, I have to skip participating in the firehose because of overload.

In the end, I think I'd rather see too much media in the CN thread than miss some of the wonderful shots of the day's stage. And if it's too much some, just scroll down.

[Carlos M]

Originally Posted by Deadly99

GO!!! Pynd

Anyone (Ned?) knows what'll be Lyndon's strategy for today? Will he give up navigation and try to keep up with Despres or Helder's speed? Or letting them pass and do his own thing? Third option (less rational) wait for Laya and just enjoy the scenery...

[drgunther]

Originally Posted by Carlos M

Anyone (Ned?) knows what'll be Lyndon's strategy for today? Will he give up navigation and try to keep up with Despres or Helder's speed? Or letting them pass and do his own thing? Third option (less rational) wait for Laya and just enjoy the scenery...

If I were to guess I think he'll be doing his own navigation and just continue trusting himself. He mentioned during the interview last night that he was expected to be overtaken pretty early on in the SS today.

[8340SU]

[8340SU]

PITUSCHOLZ Sebastián Scholz 1m
En menos de 5min largamos el Enlace E9 #Dakar2013 pic.twitter.com/OgV4iMTX

[Flanny]

Originally Posted by 8340SU

Popcorn and coffee????

Only in F5 land!

[640 Armageddon]

Originally Posted by paulk46

i hate those invisible keystrokes

@ work, trying to keep keystrokes to a minimum

sorry...

[Flood]

Originally Posted by 8340SU

PITUSCHOLZ Sebastián Scholz 1m
En menos de 5min largamos el Enlace E9 #Dakar2013 pic.twitter.com/OgV4iMTX

OK that's cool. A list of all actual WPs. I'm sure Bluebull or Hogwild could do some magic with this info.