From Evernote:

Right bike, wrong course

It's ironic that, after spending 12 months and several thousand dollars building a bike to ride on soft sand that the desert flooded and the course had to be changed. The SDBC committee did an excellent job in getting permits at the last minute for the Great Victoria Desert, a process that normally takes eight week. The race director plotted a 587km course along the Anne Beadell Highway from Mabel Station out to Annes Corner. The course included the nuclear test area of Emu - it's not everyone that can claim to have raced a bike across a nuclear blast zone. Lead might be a better material than titanium.

The highway has mainly hard surfaces with little sand. It's renowned for it's terrible corrugations. These were harder of the 4wd convoy that the bikes. Over the event the convoy destroyed four tyres, dropped two fuel tanks, broke the power steering on two vehicles and blew a complete set of shocks on a Pajero that then wobbled like a jelly.

On the bikes you could usually find a line around the worst of the corrugations, though if you miss judged it the deep ones would buck and thump until you lost all your forward momentum.

If you were building a bike for this kind of terrain you'd go for something with large springs front and back. That said, the Fatbikes were not disgraced. Simon and I came in 2nd and 4th. Rocket Ron had thin wheels but fat thighs. I saw him at the start of each stage and at the presentation when they handed him first prize. Lynton, winner in 2008, repeated his role as the man that would never give up. We passed him a couple of times only to have him come back in the last moments of the stage.

As well as wheel prints in the sand there where camel tracks. Simon surprised one that intelligently took off down the road. Simon followed it for 10km and got it up to 29kmh at one point. It was foaming at the mouth, which I believe is a sign of sexual excitement in the male camel.