Where to begin?
A few questions maybe?
Why do a rally? Really?
For me it’s doing the very thing that inspired me to get into riding adventure bikes in the first place. The Dakar has inspired a whole industry, the roots of adventure riding can be traced directly to Rallying. Just as the roots of sports bikes are from track racing.
More, I get to enter in to a rite of passage of sorts that is far beyond the corporate bullshit, traffic jams and telephone bills. To shout at the wind and see if what I’ve got, still means something, if only to me. Also to join with others and witness their stories and share in the adventure. It’s a recipe that speaks to me deeply.
Lastly, shit, who doesn’t want to ride in a rally and visit stunning parts of our country?!
I’ve had a shit year, divorce really isn’t for sissies.
For many reasons the above being one of major ones, I had ridden the beast only once in 7 months. That was to Fishoek and back to test the new battery. Other than that, my preparation for the Amageza was some sporadic mountain biking. Banting had also made some substantial inroads to my waistline so I suppose that was a big benefit to the process. I was about 10kg down on my couch surfing weight.
To tell the truth I wasn’t looking forward to the Amageza as much as I had for the others for all the shit that I was dealing with. But, as I had plopped money down as soon as Alex had opened the entries and Justin was committed, I couldn’t really let him down.
I didn’t have a garage anymore and the beast was stored in a Unit along with most of my life. Preparing my bike from a powerless storage unit that took 40 minutes to drive to wasn’t much fun and hugely inconvenient.
2 weeks before the race I started preparing. Over the months I’d created a lists of the stuff I need. It didn’t look too imposing or expensive. How wrong I’d be! First off servicing the bike, unbelievably, 3 of the cam bridge bolts stripped the Allen key holes. It took a bit of butchery to finally get them out. Not before taking the whole subframe and exhausts off.
A new F2R roadbook was mounted and I was going to try out using my Iphone’s rally app for the cap heading and ICO. An Iphone holder was mounted above this. I was quite pleased with the result.
It’s a bit rough, but it works
It seems that anything to do with rallying comes in multiples of R1000.00. The closer I got to kickoff the more my bank had to cough up these multiples. I stopped checking my bank notification SMS’s after a while out of shear terror.
The weekend before we were to drive to Uppington, I went for a 300km shakedown ride. It was a tough bit of everything where I purposely tried to break things. A few things obliged; IPhone holder and back brake, rear exhaust manifold got a crack in it, this was better than having them go during the race. So off with the subframe again
I serviced the bike once more and checked all clearances in the cams and changed filters again.
The day before we were to leave, I had done most of what was on my list, it seemed ready. I certainly wasn’t.
![N[]vA](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/39fc70600d70a0afa40b682c3a695dc0?s=96){kind=avatar}
