After five hours and 250 gruelling South American miles, Sara Price and Saydiie Gray were done with the third stage of Desafío Ruta 40.
The all-Argentinian loop in and out of San Rafael did, however, hold one more surprise for the Defender pair. Investigating the times for the stage on her phone, Gray looked across at her driver and composed her next sentence.
“Sara, I think we won…”
Nothing unusual about this pair winning off-road, they’ve been doing it since they started competing together. But that day? Well, it had been a day.
Looking back now, Gray smiles: “It was such a tough stage, but it turned into something amazing.”
Throughout the adventure that was the third round of the FIA World Rally-Raid Championship, and Gray’s maiden outing as part of the Defender factory team, the 19-year-old admitted none of it felt real.
“It just never hit me,” she says. “It never hit me what I was actually doing. I was just going day-by-day and tackling whatever was coming my way – because it’s coming at you at 100 miles an hour.”
The phone’s ringing.
It’s a few months earlier and Gray sees Sara’s name flash up on the screen. Turns out Price’s regular co-driver Sean Berriman can’t make Argentina.
“Sara said: ‘Hey, he can’t go. Can you make it? Have you been training? Are you free?’
“It was amazing. I told my dad and my mom. This was actually happening. My dad said: ‘Well we better carry on training!’”
Gray’s father is Jeremy Gray, a hugely well regarded navigator in the American off-road scene. It was with him that Price made her Dakar debut in a Can-Am two years ago. And it was through him that Saydiie and Sara met.
Gray Jr picks up the story: “Sara was going to do the NORRA 1000 race, but my dad was already entered with somebody else. Sara asked if he knew of another co-driver. He said: ‘Well, my daughter could do it.’”
They did more than just do it. They won it. That was three years ago. The pair have stayed close since.
“At the start of this year, Sara had asked me if I would get into rally,” Gray continues. “She explained that Sean was there and set in the position, but if anything came up, she wanted me to start training and be ready as a backup.”
The moment arrived and the Grays stepped up.
“I put my heart and soul into training and preparation. Dad helped a lot, but this was super-cool. I mean, it was insane – I was not expecting this this year.”
But how do you train for a W2RC round aboard a D7X-R? Physical fitness and knowing your way around the car is a given, but how do you prepare for the navigational madness which is about to be your next five days?
“We built an app.”
Gray delivers the line with such nonchalance that it takes a moment to catch up. An app?
“Me and my dad built an app that basically you can run a road book sitting in your chair at home instead of having to go out and drive a vehicle – but we did a little mixture of both. I was going to other races, but I still had my iPad and I was training at night before the races.
“The app had a mileage simulator, so it counted you down as you read through the notes – so it was just like you were driving and your odometer was counting, but we could adjust the speed because in the Defender we were going a lot faster than before. So, we created some roadbooks and imported them as PDF files and then trained on those.”
Side-by-side racing through the desert and the dunes is an all-action sensory overload. The pitch and roll of the topography doesn’t change much from car to car, but going from a buggy to one of the most coveted seats in off-road racing was something special.
“Everybody in the Defender Rally team was so helpful,” Gray says. “Any questions I had, they were there and super-helpful. That made the adjustment easier. But getting into a race car, it’s kind of all the same for me: I just deal with what’s in front of me. I’ll figure it out and, actually, I was quite surprised at how straightforward it was – because there was a lot in front of me! Once everything was explained, I was like: ‘Oh, OK. I got this.’”
At least Gray would have the opportunity to feel her way in with a pre-event test. Except she didn’t. The pre-event test was shakedown. Welcome to the deep end.
“When we took off at shakedown, I was like: ‘Dang! This thing is fast… and this thing is fun!’
“To be honest, I didn’t really have any expectations of the car. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it was so capable and so fast. It was amazing what it could handle and how quickly we were travelling across stuff.
“After shakedown I was a lot more calm. I told myself I knew what I was doing, I’d done the preparation and I was good. Then I called my dad and asked him to talk me through this one more time! The night before the start, there were some nerves, but it was good. Then we got up, got the route and got on with it.”
The W2RC doesn’t really afford rookies the opportunity to play themselves in. Day one, stage one, you’re in for a 211-mile loop from San Juan to San Juan. And this being Argentina, there’s a bit of everything including sand, dirt, mud and some very fast sections which look to have been lifted straight out of the World Rally Championship.
“The first stage was intense,” Gray says. “I was pretty pleased to get to the end. It was a long day, but it gave me confidence for the next day.”
And day two brought them closer to team-mates Rokas Baciuška/Oriol Vidal and Stéphane Peterhansel/Michaël Metge. After a two-hour stage, the all-women Defender #504 was just 94 seconds behind Mr Dakar himself.
The third day was the tough one that turned into something amazing.
Gray’s ruthlessly open and honest in her appraisal of the moment every co-driver dreads. The moment when things just don’t add up. She and Price had got ahead of their team-mates on the road and were making great progress, when…
“My heart sank to the bottom of my stomach,” Gray offers. “I’d made the mistake of not looking up to make sure we’d hit our [way] point. It was the biggest lesson I’ve ever learned. I was trying to figure things out and we went for a couple of kilometers and within myself I was going insane. We stopped, I looked at things and realized we’d gone way out of our way.
“How had this happened? I was losing my mind. But, of course, you can’t and you don’t, you keep figuring it out – which is what I did. We get there and the [next] waypoint opens. After that, we just pushed as hard as we could to the end of the day.”
That was the tough bit.
“Sara, I think we won…
“We’re excited, but we’re not. We got to the bivouac and we were trying to read people’s faces. Everybody was kind of quiet, then they all started cheering. Oh my God, this thing happened! The wave of relief was incredible. It was insane, so crazy.
“It was such a tough stage, but it turned into something amazing.”
The next two days were packed with more adventure, including a roll in a slow corner on the penultimate day.
“I learned so much,” says Gray, quietly, contemplatively.
“I loved it. To work with Sara and to work with a team like Defender was incredible. When we rolled, our team-mates arrived and we all pulled together – it was amazing.”
Talking to Gray, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotion and the adventure of the whole thing. It is, however, all too easy to forget she’s still a teenager. And she’s 50% of the W2RC’s first ever all-woman crew.
What’s fundamentally clear is that those things are important, but neither defines the American. She’s a racer. Born and bred.
