Over the next few weeks we expect to hear plenty more about motorcycle champ Alfie Cox at the Dakar Rally. While we’re waiting we decided to find out a little about his four wheeled exploits this year past. So, how’s it going, Alfie?
For Alfie Cox and the Arnold Chatz Cars Nissan Hardbody it’s going amazingly well, actually. After all, how many rookies manage to get to within 8 km of the finish of their very first off-road race – a 400 km national championship event, nogal – leading their class and lying third overall? Then the clutch packed in and Cox and navigator Hennie ter Steege were out of the running, but not before they’d made a few people sit up and take notice. Since then the duo have contested a further half dozen or so off-road nationals, taking a couple of class wins in those that they’ve finished.
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| The Class D 3,3 litre V6 Nissan Hardbody supplied by Nissan South Africa and prepared by Arnold Chatz cars. (Photograph: Gavin Foster).
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Cox is driving a Class D 3,3 litre V6 Nissan Hardbody supplied by Nissan South Africa and prepared by Arnold Chatz cars. How does he enjoy racing a production bakkie, after decades of competing on powerful two wheelers?
“It’s fast enough for a novice like me at the moment”, says Cox. “I’ve never raced a car before, so everything I’m doing in the bakkie is new. Having a good navigator is half the work, and Hennie’s very good, so that’s perfect. It’s easier than racing a bike, though, and you’re sitting there, strapped in, so it’s much safer. But the excitement hasn’t been the same as racing a motorcycle until now. Things happen a lot slower – sometimes you get going, but once you’ve slowed down it takes a while to get back up to speed. The bike just accelerates so much quicker.”
Cox admits that at first he didn’t realise the potential of the Nissan pickup. “Because so much of it is dead standard – the diffs, the driveshafts and so on – you can break things, so I’ve been driving very conservatively. Then after the Toyota Desert Race Mike Griffiths, who navigated for Duncan Vos in the same vehicle last year, drove with me for a couple of hundred kilometres and showed me that I was operating at way below the limit.” He put that information to good use at Mmabatho and it paid off – he won his class in the time trial and swept on to victory in the race as well. “Now it’s becoming more exciting to drive!” he grins.
I mention an embarrassing incident that I’d heard about, involving Cox and Hannes Grobler’s open-class bakkie. “Ja, well! Before they gave me the bakkie to race Nissan went testing in the desert near the Namibian border, and team manager Glynn Hall wanted to see how I drove. It was crazy – they put me in Hannes’s 330 kW pickup. To make things worse it’s left-hand-drive and has a sequential gearbox. That was the first time I’d ever driven a race car, and it just hooked up in the sand and flipped over. I thought I’d be fired for life after that but things worked out okay.”
So have we seen the end of Cox’s amazing motorcycle career? “No, not yet. I’m still contracted to KTM for the Paris-Dakar for two more years, so I’ll continue doing the overseas rallies. Next year I probably won’t ride locally though – I’ll concentrate on going for a four-wheel championship in the pickup, and run an Alfie Cox bike team with youngsters doing the riding. I’m also opening a new lifestyle showroom for my KTM dealership, and want to put more time into that. “
But first comes the big one – the Dakar – in January on a factory KTM motorcycle. With a string of top placings under his belt already there’s only one place to go – the top step of the podium. And then, perhaps to win the Dakar in a car. “It’s not impossible, but first I’d have to get the chance to be there. There are plenty of other drivers with much more experience in line, so it would take a little time. This is the first step and it’s perfect at the moment, so I just appreciate what I have. I couldn’t expect any more than that.”