Team Mitsubishi France crew Jean-Pierre Fontenay and Gilles Picard of France celebrated a superb third place at the finish of the Dakar 2000 Rally today in Cairo, Egypt, after pushing their Mitsubishi Pajero/Montero to its limits on one of the fastest Dakar rallies ever known. In first place was Frenchman Jean-Louis Schlesser’s lightweight buggy, which took advantage of the fast conditions, with fellow countryman Stephane Peterhansel second in his Mitsubishi-powered Mega Desert special.

It was a tough event, packed with drama and incidents, but the long, high speed special stages of the second half of the event in Libya turned the rally into a drag race, which handed victory on a plate to the lightweight buggy with its high top speed.

The Dakar 2000 promised to be one of the most challenging yet seen, with a completely new route running from Dakar in Senegal, almost straight across the centre of North Africa, to Cairo in Egypt. 7,616 km of special stages were planned in an overall route of 10,905 km, with some stages almost 800 km long. After the start in Paris, France, the cars were shipped to Dakar for the rally proper to begin, and initially, it was the Mitsubishis that stamped their authority on the event. The stages weren’t perfectly ideal for the most part, fast clay tracks baked hard by the sun, but there were enough technical driving challenges that required handling, traction and skill to allow the Mitsubishis to grab the advantage, although speeds were still high.

Carlos Sousa of Portugal slipped into the lead on the first stage in Senegal in his Team Mitsubishi Portugal Strakar/L200, but the more experienced Team Nisseki Mitsubishi Ralliart Pajero/Montero driver Kenjiro Shinozuka, navigated by Dominique Serieys, both former Dakar winners, moved in front on the second leg to head a Mitsubishi 1-2-3 with Sousa second and Japanese/German pairing Hiroshi Masuoka and Andreas Schulz third, also in a Pajero/Montero.

But the margins were tight, with only seconds separating the top crews. Shinozuka crept further into the lead as the rally moved from Senegal to Mali, but Schlesser’s ultra-fast buggy and Peterhansel’s lightweight Mega Desert were always close by, challenging hard. By leg four in Burkina Faso, on hot, dusty tracks Shinozuka was still in front, while all-girl crew Jutta Kleinschmidt of Germany and Tina Thorner of Sweden took their first stage victory in their Team Mitsubishi Germany Pajero/Montero. After early problems with punctures, this marked a comeback fight from Jutta and Tina, who still hoped to gain a place a day until Cairo to win!

By leg 5, Miguel Prieto was also making a dramatic comeback in his Team Mitsubishi Spain Pajero/Montero. After sever early delays he was 109th on leg two, but by leg five he had climbed back to 32nd. French pair Jean-Pierre Fontenay and Gilles Picard were having a more difficult time in their Team Mitsubishi France Pajero/Montero with niggling problems such as brake malfunction and then getting lost briefly in Burkina Faso when Jean-Pierre took a wrong turn, distracted by giving a live commentary to a TV crew hovering overhead in a helicopter!

The rally then moved into Niger on leg 6, heading for Niamey. Shinozuka crept further ahead, leading by 6m 15s from Schlesser as the rally moved away from the dusty clay tracks and tropical forests and into the sandy sub-Saharan Sahel. The first sand dunes appeared on the route alongside the banks of the River Niger and the event began to take on a different look.

Fontenay was fourth, despite a close shave with a two-metre hole that nearly swallowed his Pajero/Montero. He noticed it at the last minute and managed to stop just in time, commenting that his brakes were obviously now working well! Fellow Mitsubishi driver Masuoka was less fortunate however, plunging straight into the hole, blinded by dust clouds from the cars in front. He soon got towed out, and the super-strong Mitsubishi was virtually undamaged! Kleinschmidt had managed to work her way back up to sixth by this point, but made no progress on the leg to Niamey after hitting a tree stump and picking up yet another puncture. Prieto was now up to an impressive 25th.

Then the first of two rally disasters struck. The French authorities warned the rally organisers that they should not progress further into Niger, as there were threats of heavy terrorist activity that could endanger the rally. The organisers were obliged in the interests of safety to cancel the next five days of rallying - the first time this had happened in 22 years - and airlift the entire entourage to Libya. It was a massive undertaking. Three huge Russian Antonov 124 cargo planes, each with a 73 metre wingspan and capable of carrying over 100 tonnes, were drafted into action. Eighteen 10 hour flights over five days were planned to airlift 336 vehicles and 1,365 people to Sabha in Libya, were the restart was planned to take place on January 17. Amazingly, everything went to plan. The Antonovs worked day and night without incident, and on January 17, the rally was again underway, this time in Libya and the start of the real desert stages.

Initially, it was business as usual with Shinozuka creeping ahead yet again to increase his lead to 7m 10s over the short 146 km special stage to Waw El Kebir with its amazing 40 metre high sand dunes. But on the 12th stage, the rally suddenly took a turn for the worse for anyone driving a proper car. Recent rains, followed by cold, dry weather had turned the sand to concrete. The Dakar 2000 turned from a rally into a drag race as the cars blasted their way across the desert floor for two or three hundred kilometres at a time at top speed. For the cars, it was a disaster as the lightweight buggies, over 600 kg lighter than the Mitsubishis, raced into the lead with their higher top speeds. There was nothing to challenge either car or driver - it was like driving on a motorway. Leg 12 was 657 km long, and Shinozuka, became the leading car in third place, with Schlesser and Peterhansel first and second respectively in their "specials".

Then disaster struck again. The high-speed stages and the need to chase the buggies meant car drivers were taking chances, and soon a price had to be paid. Four cars, three of them Mitsubishis and one a Nissan, blasted over the top of a sand dune 63 km into stage 13 and spiralled into high-speed rolls on the other side of a steep drop. Shinozuka, Sousa, Prieto, all three in Mitsubishis, and Greogoire de Mevius in a Nissan, all crashed heavily into retirement. Medical rescue helicopters rushed the four drivers and their four navigators to the Medical centre and then to the University Hospital in Tunisia for checkups, and the rally continued without them.

Jean-Pierre Fontenay then took up the Mitsubishi banner to moved up to third, but there was nothing he could do in the conditions to catch the Schlesser buggy which opened up a lead of a quarter of an hour over Peterhansel and half an hour over Fontenay.

The next long 789 km stage which brought the rally into Egypt and the Oasis of Dakhla sealed the result, and Fontenay’s third place, with Kleinschmidt fifth and Masuoka sixth was the best the Mitsubishi, or any car driver, could expect. Once in Egypt, the nature of the rally changed again, but with only two proper stages remaining, both relatively short, it was too late for the cars to catch up. The 352-km stage around Dakhla was much more technical, although still fast in places, in the Western Desert, and over dunes, through white marble valleys and a spectacular descent over a cliff of cascading sand, the Mitsubishis scored a 1-2-3 stage victory headed by Fontenay. On the penultimate stage, it was Hiroshi Masuoka’s turn and he blasted his way to a spectacular stage victory in his Pajero/Montero.

In the end, however, the high-speed nature of the stages made it impossible to win in anything other than a light-weight special, and with Schlesser celebrating victory and Peterhansel second, Fontenay could take comfort in being the best of the "proper" cars in his Mitsubishi Pajero/Montero in third.

He said at the finish at the Pyramids in Cairo: "The Dakar 2000 was very fast. I’m sorry that there were no more challenging stages, which the Dakar should have had. I really wanted to win this year, but I will enter again next year to win!"

Hiroshi Masuoka added: "It was a shame that we couldn’t do the whole rally. I wanted to drive the stages in Niger. But after the rally entered Egypt I had great fun and I think I was able to demonstrate the real abilities of the Pajero/Montero in proper rally conditions. I’m not satisfied with sixth place, but very happy with our performance in Egypt.

Kleinschmidt, who had been plagued by punctures throughout the event, stated: "This year the rally was very, very fast. I’m sorry I had so many punctures, which was very frustrating, but I would have preferred the Dakar to have been a real off-road rally which would have really shown the potential of the Pajero/Montero".

In the challenging T1 category, which is for virtually standard cars, Brazilian Klever Kolberg survived the adverse conditions to take an impressive second in class in his Mitsubishi Pajero/Montero.

High-speed or not, the Dakar 2000 was an extraordinary challenge, and for the 95 cars that eventually reached Cairo, the real sense of relief and achievement was overwhelming. In the end they had covered 7,869km, 5,018 km competitively, and it takes a special kind of driver, navigator and car just to get to the finish!

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