This weekend, activity will resume in the Raids World Championship, with the Rally Morocco, an event in which the main riders in the speciality will take part, including members of the Repsol KTM team, Marc Coma and Jordi Viladoms. The rally will consist of seven stages across 2,500 kilometres of Zagora in the South of Morocco, 1,915 of which will be timed.
In this event, Marc Coma will make his return to the competition; fully recovered from the injury he suffered in June, when he was leading the Rally Sardinia. During this time, the Repsol rider has been able to fully recover and even climb Mont Blanc with Dani Pedrosa and the popular adventurer Jesús Calleja. With his sights set on renewing his title in the Dakar 2010, Coma is approaching this race as perfect training for the South American race.
Competing with him once again will be Jordi Viladoms who, after coming fourth in Tunisia, wants to put in a good performance in Morocco on his KTM 690 Rally, a bike that he has not used since then. The race will close this year’s Raids World Championship and is the last big race between now and the Dakar; the final level test before the new South American event.
Unlike the usual format of the cross-country rallies in the World Championship in which Coma and Viladoms compete, on this occasion, the organisers of Rally Morocco have focused on Zagora, where all the stages will start and finish. By doing this, the organisation has tried to find a solution to reducing logistics costs, offering a race that will go round the same timed loop twice every day, without needing to move the bivouac and all of the support services. This solution decreases the importance of navigation and restricts the possibility of travelling around the country, although the race will include stages with sand dunes and the typical and dangerous rocky tracks through the Moroccan mountains.
The race will start on Sunday, with a 298-kilometre stage, 277 of them timed.
Marc Coma
“I feel good and I’m looking forward to racing, although until we are there and the race starts, I won’t know exactly how I feel. Anyway, I felt good during training and this race will be good for us to recover the pace of the competition and clock up more kilometres because Dakar is getting nearer. We’re not going to get obsessed with achieving any results, but go out to enjoy the race and try to be competitive. We know Morocco well because we go down there to train whenever we can, and I’m sure we find all kinds of stages, both dunes and broken tracks and with all the navigation they want.”
Jordi Viladoms
“I’m very keen to take on this race because I haven’t been on a Raids bike since Rally Tunisia, and that race went very well. What’s more, it’s very good training for the Dakar, so we will try to enjoy it as much as possible. What we do have clear is that we have to be careful, because Dakar is getting nearing, but from here on, we are not going to miss the opportunity to compete and try to finish on the podium, which will be our aim. Personally, I feel really good; better than at this stage of the season last year, so I’m looking forward to starting.”
