Alfie Cox is off on a mission to prove that nice guys can win
Gavin Foster MOTORCYCLING
Twenty-two times South African champion motorcycle racerAlfie Cox recenly left for Nice to participate in the week-long, 2 000km Tunisian Rally.
“Third place, third place, third place. Now I’m tired of it,” says the man who dumfounded the experts by taking fourth place in his first Paris-Dakar rally as a privateer three years ago. Since then Cox has ridden in a string of international desert races, but victory has so far eluded him – in 1999 he harvested three third places and a second from five international races in North Africa and Europe. The one race he failed to complete, the Tunisian Rally, saw him retire with a mechanical problem three days from the end of the event. His position at the time? Third.
Cox is known as the Mr Nice Guy of motor sport – unfailingly polite and approachable, he readily gives of his time for a friendly chat or interview, no matter how busy he may be. But he’s fiercely loyal to himself, his sponsors and his supporters, which cost him dearly last year. Back in 1998, when he was a privateer, KTM’s team riders were having problems in the Dakar, and the Austrian team’s management decided to recruit Cox to offer support to their remaining works riders. But although KTM had supplied Cox’s bike, he’d had to raise more than R200 000 just to be able to enter the event and get to the start.
Each night he sat in his tiny tent till the small hours, trying by torchlight to make sense of the instructions, which were always in French, for the following day’s stage. “Suddenly, when I looked like getting a good finish all that changed,” he remembers. “They rolled the red carpet out. When I arrived at the overnight stops the KTM mechanics would wheel my bike away for maintenance, and I’d be given a chair and a cold drink so I could relax while somebody else pitched my tent.”
But KTM’s expectations were a little high. “They wanted me to ride to team orders,” he remembers. “I was expected to ride as a back-up to the KTM first team. I wasn’t supposed to overtake, and if anything broke on the works machines I was supposed to stop and let their rider take the parts he needed off my bike, leaving me to wait a couple of hours for the support vehicles. I told them I’d appreciated what they’d done for me, but that I’d paid my own way to get there. I was going to try to win this race, for myself, my sponsors and my supporters.” Cox finished fourth that year.
Cox’s performance couldn’t be ignored, and a year later, in January 1999, he was one of seven riders in the KTM works team at the Dakar. “They’d decided to go for broke that year, and fielded seven of us on full works machines,” he says. Cox had first-class equipment but his only financial reward would be any prize money he claimed. That year he finished third.
After two starts and two finishes, both in the top four, his future looked secure with KTM. But in 2000 came the shock. KTM decided to run a much smaller works team, and Cox wasn’t in it. Instead he was offered a place in the Austrian manufacturer’s international team – a sort of second team who would be supplied with slower bikes and given limited factory support, but who would always ride in the shadow of the works riders. “Only afterwards did I find out why I was treated like that,” he says. “1998 had stuck in their minds. They wanted people who would obey orders, be yes-men, and they remembered 1998. They didn’t even speak to me about it till I asked them much later why I hadn’t been offered a ride.”
Still, Cox had a bike, albeit a slow one, and factory support. “It was up to me to show them that I could still do it.” But it was not to be.
KTM inexplicably changed the supplier of their pistons and crankshaft bearings just before the Dakar, and the team was plagued by engine failure due to inferior components. Cox broke down in the desert and, after effecting an engine swap when his support vehicle eventually turned up, arrived at the day’s final checkpoint 12 hours late. Because he was so far off schedule, he was then given an eight-hour penalty, placing him an effective 20 hours off the pace.
A good place was out of the question, but the South African still rode his heart out for the remainder of the race, to win a stage and claw his way back from 124th to 98th place by Stage 16. Then he stopped, while leading the stage, to assist KTM works rider Jurgen Mayer, who eventually won the day with Cox a close second.
But for KTM it didn’t work out – the top three places in the Dakar were taken by BMW riders, and Cox reached the final checkpoint in 45th place. Without the eight-hour penalty, his time would have placed him fourth.
This year could be make or break for the 37-year-old KwaZulu-Natal rider. His willingness to fight right to the end at Dakar 2000, even though a top placing was out of the question, and his efforts to help the team to the finish, were heeded. He’s a member of the full works team again, and will be supplied with the best machinery KTM can build. He’ll also, for the first time, be on a salary for the five international races he contests. “It’s nothing like cricket or rugby players get,” he says, “but at least I’ll be getting paid to race – it’s about time after all these years. My one regret is that I haven’t made money out of my racing. But I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it.”
Perhaps the last word should go to Dr Michael Ganal, head of BMW’s motorcycle operations worldwide. I met him at a BMW launch last year, and the conversation turned to the Dakar, Alfie Cox, and BMW’s approaches to him to join their team. “Alfie Cox, ” said Ganal, “is the finest ambassador for motorsport that South African could wish for.”