"I think the team did a great job," says an on-message McRae. Last year in the WRC McRae finished seventh in points driving for Citroen. "And Colin is a part of those plans, yes." We’ve been told to win next year, it’s going to be hard work, but we will do our utmost," says Gilles Martineau, Nissan team director. Both claim to have emerged from the encounter impressed. but it’s not quite as hard as I had in my mind."įor McRae and the Nissan team, 2004 was a getting-to-know-you-type exercise, a chance for him to decide if rally raids were his thing, and an opportunity for Nissan to assess the Scotsman’s pace in the desert. "According to everybody who’s done it before, this was a very, very tough one-maybe the toughest one. "There’s a huge hype around Dakar and how difficult it is," says McRae, relaxing with a beer after the finish.
How did it feel to prove the critics wrong? Prior to the start of the rally, McRae’s doubters were loudly questioning how close to the finish he would actually manage to get-predicting either one of the spectacular accidents that marked his World Rally career, or that he would give up and walk away at his first major setback.
"Once the good-result possibility was gone, I still had the other goal, which was still pretty tough, to get to Dakar." "The goal was to finish the rally and have a good result," McRae explains. The lows came with reliability problems for his Nissan truck, dropping him almost a full 24 hours on winner Stephane Peterhansel’s Mitsubishi into a 20th-place finish. The high points for the former World Rally champion included two outright stage wins and a strong, top-three position during the first few days.
It’s a sort of love-hate relationship, depending on how it goes." You’ve got to accept that there is going to be a lot of monotony, a lot of ups and downs. But I’d prepared mentally for it and it would have to be a complete disaster for me not to have enjoyed it. It takes awhile to realize the difference is nothing more than that he is smiling not something that happened too frequently during his last few seasons in the WRC.įirst question: What did the Scotsman think of his first taste of the Dakar’s 7000-mile course through the deserts of northwest Africa? And it is not just his lobster-pink suntan or his new Nissan-branded clothing. COLIN McRAE looks unfamiliar as he sits by the swimming pool of a five-star Senegal hotel, just hours after finishing his first Dakar rally.
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