Team Rally Raid Canada > Rally Racer Don Hatton

Greetings Team Rally Raid Canada fans:

I am writing this from Buenes Aires where I am waiting the arrival of my team.

Thought I would let you know how I feel about no longer being in the Rally, I was very upset and was unable to comment earlier.

In short I am angry and very sad at the same time, the Dakar Rally is an event where everything has to go in your favor in order to finish, unfortunatley this year I was not so lucky.

It seems that nothing went my way, right from the beginning; with three months to the Dakar I broke my hand, my bike arrived 1 1/2 months late to Canada, I contracted the swine flu and had to deliver the bike for shipping while very very sick, my tire order not arriving at all.

I think the Dakar Gods were sending me a message and I was not receiving it.

At risk of sounding like I am feeling sorry for myself here is a summary of my 2010 Dakar Rally.

Read the rest of this entry →

No word from the front lines yet, but Don has successfully completed Stage 2 of the rally.

Don, this was undoubtedly an eventful day, and your flair for the dramatic is certainly garnering lots of fans (and bandwidth!) over at ADVRider.

In the picture at right, Don runs to retrieve his KTM, with Mark Miller bearing down on him in his Team Red Bull Volkswagen. This spot was a shallow water crossing over a weir, where many riders were caught out by the extremely slippery surface.

As for the specific results, Don finished the stage ranked 141, and was assessed 1:34 of penalities. Today was a bit of a nail biter for Hatton fans; according to the tracking on the dakar.com website, Don didn’t appear to pass the second checkpoint.

Obviously, something went awry today. Perhaps the situation with the second checkpoint had something to do with the penalities, or they may have been assessed due to Don’s time card incident. Stay tuned for more details.