Sergei Shmakov and Konstantin Meshcheryakov buggy crew of the Moscow-ZIL team which made their debut at Dakar 2007 not only made it to the finish - a feat in itself - but came the 14th, a great result for newcomers. Konstantin Meshcheryakov, the team's navigator, shares the impressions of his first Dakar rally with the "Aquatoria of Luxury Life".
- Konstantin, I'd like to start with a provocative question if you don't mind. When journalists talk about rally crews they tend to mention just the pilot's name. Do you think it's fair? Who's the boss there?
- There's no boss. Rally people have a saying: "The race is won by the pilot and lost by the navigator". I think it's only partially true: in most cases the navigator is indeed responsible for failure but it's the crew who wins the race. However great the pilot may be there's no way to win without synchronised, smoothly coordinated action. The navigator's mistakes usually cost more lost time than the pilot's, though the latter also can, for example, get the car stuck in the sand so it would take hours to get back on the road. Of course I'm talking about tactical mistakes here, not about, say, accidents when there's no chance of getting back in the race.
Ours is an unusual sport: you've got to understand that the pilot normally shouldn't think at all. They should just drive, flawlessly and fast. It's mostly the navigator' job to think and decide where the car should go and how fast, know where the checkpoints and the finish are, remember the fines for various blunders. If the pilot tries to do the navigator's job it's going to be no good - as well as if the navigator tries to tell the pilot how to drive. If both of them get into technical stuff, kick around the mechanics, set up the monitoring etc., it won't be any good either. I am convinced that only a professional team can get good results, when everyone is tops in their field but never interferes with the others' jobs.
- How many people where in your team?
- I think ours was maybe the biggest team at the Dakar. Volkswagen probably had more people, but they had more vehicles too. We had six mechanics, the master mechanic from America, two drivers to drive the mechanics, a doctor, PR people, two insurance trucks and the camper driver - so we could take a rest in comfort before the next stage.
- By the way, how much does it cost to get a team ready for the Dakar?
- A lot, especially for newcomers. It's not a military secret but I just don't know exactly because I haven't been directly involved in this. I think the figure is quite large. As far as I know, being part of the Russian Team cost the Russians about 200,000 per person. Italians from Nissan Technosport charged about the same. The price includes full pre-race service and maintenance, but not the air fare.
But there's a fine point here to keep in mind, though: everything is paid in advance so the service team may be tempted not to work very hard - so they wouldn't have to go the whole 10,000 kilometres to Dakar. Also, labour laws are sacred to the French even in the desert. If you need something at two in the morning and the storekeeper has switched off the lights already, forget it - he won't give it to you whatever you do. He'll give you a thousand reasons why not, and I can't say he's completely wrong here. It's not our mechanics who're willing to work 24 hours a day if need be, like during the Great Patriotic war. And our mechanics' skills are every bit as good as, say, the Frenchmen's. If we had enough spare parts we could reassemble the machine from ground zero every day, if need be.
- At the Russian championship you drive a Mitsubishi but at the World Cup and the Dakar it was a buggy. Why change the "iron horse"?
- At the Dakar and the World Cup the main battle is fought between two manufacturers' teams, Mitsubishi and Volkswagen. The BMW isn't exactly a company team: it's supported by the maker but officially remains private. Maybe that's why they can't really compete with Mitsubishi and Volkswagen. There's really no point trying to beat manufacturers' teams on their own territory, so you have to try and find ways to adapt.
When Jean-Louis Schlesser came up with his buggy he asked the FIA committee to change the technical regulations for rear-wheel drive buggies: after all, they compete at the same route as the full-wheel drive vehicles. Schlesser's request was granted and buggies were allowed to have more suspension travel, wheel pumps, lower minimum weight. Thanks to that buggy racers got a chance to compete with manufacturers' teams practically on equal terms, though the latter's budgets are incomparably bigger. And Schlesser showed how it's done: this year he was on the podium and before that won the Dakar several times. So buggy is an alternative, a parallel alley for development of technical thinking, which allows to get decent results at incomparably lower cost.
- Did you build your buggy yourselves?
- No. Our first two buggies were Dutch but now they are morally obsolete. When we decided to change the previous machine we did some research to find out which ones were the best. It turned out the best came from America, made by Jim Wilson.
Then there was a lot of talks, agreeing the details, signing contracts specifying every little thing, checked and re-checked by legions of lawyers - in a word, a long and quite tedious business. Then the work on the vehicle started, which had to be overseen too: even with lots of details specified in the contract, in the end you might get a vehicle which is exactly like the contract says it should be but not quite what you expected, because some things we believe are self-evident are nothing of the sort to Americans. And of course there was the timeframe issue: we hoped to get the vehicle in six months and it took almost a year.
In the end we've been late for the beginning of the season and only started at the Morocco rally. Strangely enough we've made it to the finish there, though we wouldn't have been surprised if it wasn't the case. The buggy is truly better than the previous ones. It doesn't make tremendous speed but it proved itself to be a kind of tough, reliable ZIL.
There's a problem with the plastic: the one the Americans have installed has the frontal drag like a metro train, but that was the best they could come up with though they've searched throughout America. We could buy it from Schlesser, it would fit, but Schlesser doesn't want to sell just the plastic, he wants to sell the whole buggy and that's quite different money - about 700,000 Euros for a used vehicle without an engine. By the way there's a rumour Schlesser didn't actually make his buggy but bought it from the Americans, than spent a year looking how the Americans race, then returned to Europe, tuned the vehicle up so it would meet the FIA requirements and started driving it.
- What's the Dakar to you?
- The Dakar is a well-publicised, popular race but it's more an adventure than purely sporting contest. The Dakar winner becomes quite popular in Europe but at, say the World Cup their authority would be next to nothing if they don't show good results there as well. So a lot of people including amateurs always came to the Dakar rally for the adrenalin and the impressions - and always will be coming.
Ilya Kalinov
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