Dakar: The secrets of successful navigation

With today’s stage of the 2017 Dakar Rally playing a key role in deciding the outcome of the race – and already seeing a number of leading contenders beset with navigational issues – we spoke with Red Bull KTM Technical Manager Stefan Huber to discuss some of the secrets to successfully staying on track.

Step one for that is the road book – the Dakar rider’s map for the day, provided by the organisers and heavily annotated personally by every rider themselves. And despite the progress of technology like GPS, Huber says that it will always remain the most important tool.

“The road book is by far the most vital piece of navigation equipment on a rally bike. It comes in the form of a long scroll of paper that offers specific directions at set distances along the course. We place it inside the aluminium holder and there’s a mini electric motor to roll the paper forward and backward if needed.

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 “The road book is well protected inside its case and it’s extremely important for it to be rolling freely so that our riders can read it. In the extreme case the electric rolling mechanism stops functioning, riders can always roll the road book manually using the handles on the left. But that means they should be taking their hand off the bars, probably losing time in the process.”

The road book is linked to a series of odometers, designed to be highly accurate and to allow riders to know both how far they’ve gone and to match distances to known landmarks and waypoints.

“Right above the road book holder we have two smaller instruments that have the same size and shape. The one on the left is the trip meter and the one on the right is the compass heading. Both these instruments are directly connected to the GPS tracking that’s provided by organization. The trip meter on the left gives accurate distance information in kilometres and the compass heading gives the right direction as a number value in degrees.”

“Right under the road book holder we have a third trip master, that’s mainly used as a back-up,” explains Stefan. “The main difference is that this third trip master is connected to the front wheel sensor instead of the GPS and that’s how it measures distance.

“In the past race organizers created road books based on distance from trip meters connected to the bike’s wheels, but it’s not the case any more. In the Dakar the most accurate way to measure your distance is always the trip meter that gets data from the GPS.”

But modern tech isn’t completely restricted, with, as the Austrian says, the whole system linking back to a GPS system that not only provides riders with location information but also provides the organisers with an emergency tracking and contact link to them in case of an emergency.

“Mounted exactly on top of the upper triple clamp and handlebars is the GPS, which is set by the organization. With navigation mostly done using the road book, the GPS is used to spot the waypoints during each stage.

“When riders get close to a waypoint they get an arrow on the screen of their GPS. The arrow actually shows the correct direction to the waypoint. Once you’ve passed through this waypoint the arrow disappears and the GPS goes back to showing the compass.”

“Placed on the front left side of our carbon fibre navigation tower is the Iritrack safety tracker, which enables real-time monitoring and tracking of our riders by the Dakar organization. Riders can notify the rally organization of an emergency pushing the red button on the Iritrack. If a rider stops unexpectedly, organization can contact to ask if they’re OK. If it takes the rider more than three minutes to respond, they can alert the emergency rescue team.”

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