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The second marathon stage had just ended and Marc Coma was in a fix. In his attempt to increase his lead over his arch rival, Paulo Goncalves, Marc had made the judgemental error of going all out during the stage and as a result, had completely worn out his KTM’s tyres. The marathon stages test the competitors' ability to independently manage without their team’s support, and with his tyres in such a condition, it would be impossible for Marc to maintain his lead. These bald tyres now stood in the way of his fifth Dakar Rally title.
The bivouac in Uyuni, where the competitors were spending the night in isolation, was bustling with activity. In one end of the camp, a skinny 31-year old Dakar debutant was dealing with his own set of problems. Nursing a fractured toe, swollen limbs and other bruises, he was formulating a strategy to make up for a 40 minute penalty he had been hit with earlier, which had brought down his stage’s ranking to 51. But as soon as he heard of his fellow KTM rider’s predicament, he didn’t think twice before walking over and handing his own spare wheel to Marc, who then went on to dominate the rest of the rally and take home his fifth Dakar Rally title.This 31-year old was none other than CS Santosh.
Chunchunguppe ShivashankarSantosh, or CS Santosh as he’s popularly known, recently created history by becoming the first Indian ever to participate and successfully complete the Dakar Rally. While entering such a rally in a four wheeler or even a truck might seem like a scary proposition, CS Santosh successfully completed the 9,295 kilometre raid on a motorcycle. Though his 36th position might not seem that impressive on paper, you have to remember that the Dakar Rally is undeniably the toughest endurance rally in the world and that less than half of the competitors who start the race manage to inch across the finish line. The Dakar Rally is infamous for its challenging stages which take the competitors through inhospitable conditions, and sees multiple fatalities each year, both among the competitors as well as the spectators.
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Competitors are pretty much isolated from the rest of world when they race in the Dakar, as getting rest during the dark takes priority over updating your facebook status and it was only after the rally was over that Santosh realised the support he had been getting on the social media, over the past two weeks. Since getting back from South America, Santosh hasn’t used the Dakar Rally as an excuse to sit back and take a long vacation. He made a quick recovery from his injuries and earned another feather in his cap by winning the 2015 Maruti Suzuki Desert Storm Rally astride a Suzuki RMX450z.
However, winning the Desert Storm and Raid De Himalaya has become somewhat of a routine for Santosh. Having started his racing career with TVS in 2003, he has been actively involved in the testing and development of TVS race bikes. The jewels in his crown include two National Supercross championships, three time National Dirt Track championships and multiple Desert Storm and Raid De Himalaya victories. Internationally, he has broken into the top five of the Asian Motocross Championship twice and won the Sri Lanka Fox Hill rally in 2010. He has also competed in the World Cross Country Rallies at Qatar Sealine as well as the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge.
The Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge is one of the prominent cross country rallies, in which competitors brave the harsh temperatures and the challenging terrain of the majestic Liwa desert, for five days.Currently in its 25th year, the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge is regarded as the stepping stone to the Dakar Rally. Santosh became the first Indian to participate in the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in 2013, though the rally turned out to be nothing short of a nightmare for him. On the third day of the rally, Santosh started to face some issues with his Suzuki MX 450z, and when he was just 20 kilometres away from the end of stage, his bike caught fire. Santosh suffered third-degree burns in the accident, forcing him to abort the rally midway. Nevertheless, Santosh was back in Abu Dhabi the following year and this time around, he not only completed the rally, but also broke into the top 10 rankings whilst rubbing shoulders with the aces like Coma and Goncalves.
While the announcement of his participation in the 2015 Dakar Rally came less than a month before the actual race, Santosh had started his preparations a long time ago.You cannot just wake up one day and decide that you are going to participate in the Dakar Rally! The 9th place in the 2014 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge had earned Santosh the red carpet invitation for the Dakar Rally, though he had a hard time finding someone to sponsor him. Santosh makes no bones about the fact that the Dakar has been his ultimate goal for many years. However, getting to Buenos Aires was only half of the dilemma as South America’s vast expanses of beige, slush and rocky terrain presented Santosh with a bigger set of problems. While Santosh had dealt with desert raids before, the magnitude of the Dakar Rally is completely different. The stages of the Dakar Rally are mapped to present the riders with a wider set of challenges and this year’s edition also saw the inclusion of the spectacular salt flats.
A total of 168 competitors started the Dakar Rally in Santosh’s category, of which 89 failed to finish by the end of it. Santosh had quite a humble start in the Dakar Rally as he managed to finish in the 85th position on the first day, though past the first stage, he kept on improving his performance.By the end of the ninth stage, Santosh had broken into the top 40, and on the 13th day, Santosh finished in the 36th position, bringing a stirring end to the nerve-wracking rally.
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The team plays a crucial role in endurance rallies and Santosh attributes a big chunk of the credit to KTM. In an event like Dakar, the last thing you want to do is get distracted by the hassles of the motorcycle, though with KTM, Santosh says that he didn’t have to worry about the bike at all. Despite the battering his 450 Rally Replica faced every day, the service team ensured that the bike was up and running the next morning, ready to take on another gruelling stage.
While speaking about the marathon stages, Santosh compares himself to the sailor who doesn’t know how to swim. While he might be adept at riding motorcycles on broken roads, Santosh sheepishly admits that he isn’t that great when it comes to getting his hands greasy. He accepts that luck was on his side during the marathon stages and that if there would’ve been any major malfunction in the motorcycle then, he wouldn’t have been able to fix them.
Planning is a key part of the Dakar and competitors have to keep rethinking their strategy depending upon their progress in the stage. The change in terrain, change in temperatures, psychological strain as well as the physical injuries are all a part and parcel of endurance racing. In the fifth stage, Santosh met with a crash on the 697 kilometre route between Copiapo and Antofagasta, which resulted in a bleeding nose, a hairline fracture in his toe and bruised shoulders. Despite these, Santosh continued to race and finished the stage in the 51st position. How did he manage that? “When you focus all your energy at some goal, injuries and broken bones don’t really matter,” says Santosh. “The goal acts as your motivation and you keep on pushing yourself to the limit to achieve it.”
Once he is off the motorcycle though, Santosh presents a quite a contradictory picture. Santosh’s father taught him to play golf when he was 17, and despite it being poles apart from racing, he quite enjoys playing it in his free time. Santosh doesn’t actually own a motorcycle for his personal use and when he is at his home, he prefers walking down to wherever he wants to go.He says that people like him spend so much time riding a motorcycle that the last thing they want to do in their free time is get on a motorcycle again.
In the world of motorsports, confidence is highly essential to succeed. But sometimes superstitions and pre-race rituals play an equally important role in boosting the morale of the racer. While Santosh doesn’t have any superstitions (or at least that’s what he tells us), he does wear his mother’s watch to every one of his races. It all began during the Raid De Himalaya in 2013, when he had to borrow his mother’s watch at the last moment, to keep track of the time during the stages. On the first day itself, while attacking the mountain stage, Santosh slipped and almost went sliding over the edge, but somehow his mother’s watch clung on to the bike and saved him from going over the cliff. Santosh says that since then, he has been wearing his mother’s watch to each one of his races, as a lucky charm.
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While the sheer size and popularity of the Dakar might lead you into believing that finding sponsorship is easy, getting someone to fund you is a very laborious task. Though Santosh did manage to garner support from KINI Red Bull Racing during the Dakar Rally, the lack of interest among Indians meant that he had to make do without any sponsors and had to shell out the cash from his own pocket. Does he think that his attempt at the Dakar Rally 2015 was enough to grab someone’s attention? “Well, this is India where things work in a weird way and I can’t say anything for sure. All I can do about it is think and stay positive.”
With the help of his very own Big Rock Motopark, which trains budding stars in the field of endurance racing and also doubles up as place for him to practice, Santosh has been trying to popularise the sport in the country for quite some time now. In a cricket crazy country which conveniently ignored sportsmen like MC Mary Kom and Gagan Narang until they proved their mettle in the Olympics, CS Santosh has gone through a lot of struggle in his attempts to promote endurance racing in India.
It has been an uphill, yet amazing journey right from the point when Santosh started motorcross racing in 2003, to the Dakar this year. Santosh's participation in the Dakar Rally was a giant leap not just for him, but also for the entire motorsports fraternity in India, though we have an intuition that his journey has just started! For now, Santosh plans to participate in at least two cross country World Championships rallies before trying for Dakar again, next year. We at CarWale and BikeWale would like to wish him the best of luck for his future endeavours.
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