Waking up on a Friday morning as early as 4am, spending a couple of hours in the desert going through practice routines, this is merely the gist of what the Gecko Honda team have been up to for the past year.
Understandable when you consider that the 20-member contingent, including seven riders, are setting out to create history at next month's Australian Safari Rally where they will be the UAE's first international rally raid team. And with only weeks till the rally flags off, lead riders Sean Linton and Steve Blackney are impatiently waiting to unleash their mean machines.
"The excitement is building up," says Blackney, adding, "we have been talking about it for so long as an event that's in the future, now it's next month and it's getting to a point where we are losing sleep now."
Linton and Blackney are not new to the rally scene and the latter revealed the motives that led to the formation of the team for the Australia event. "We have always worked together for the UAE Desert Challenge which is usually the biggest event for us in the year and that co-ordination led to us as a group deciding to do something outside the Middle East for the first time and this is just the beginning.
"Assuming this is successful, and we don't all hate each other by the time we finish in Australia, this could go bigger in the future — Paris-Dakar or beyond," says Blackney.
Team manager Stephen Dessurne said: "Sean and Steve are the top riders and it is the rest of the team who have to support them in order to get them as high a finish as possible."
Even after a year of intensive work on the machines, the tinkering continues.
"The bikes are race-proven but in motorsport you are constantly changing specific things in order to make it better and more reliable. We will still be messing around two minutes before the start. If it's not last minute then it's not racing, that's just the way it is," says 36-year-old Linton. "At the end of the day without the support of riders and mechanics it wouldn't be possible for us to do what we are trying to do."
The riders
- Sean Linton
- Steve Blackney
- Paul Welling
- David Dubois
- Jason Sockett
- Laurie Lee
- Jonathan Walley
Top guns of the Gecko Honda team
Sean Linton:
- A top-five regional rider in the UK Enduro series from 1985 to 1998, he has managed to retain his competitive status in the Middle East.
- In the UAE Desert Challenge, he has recorded two class wins, two GCC wins, three team overall wins and three top 10 finishes.
- The Scot also enjoyed a successful 10-year spell as international chief instructor for BMW Motorsport.
- World Ranking: 7th (M1-2)
Steve Blackney:
- A nine times Middle East motocross champion and a veteran of rally raids.
- Having competed in the UAE Desert Challenge since 1997, with regular top 10 finishes in the event including a third overall in 2001, Blackney travelled to Australia to race the Safari in 2000 and 2001 when it was based in the Northern Territories and most recently in 2003 in New South Wales.
- World Ranking: 18th (M2-2)