MAN 8×8

We’ve written before about Big Boy’s time as a Race2Recovery support truck, and about the DROPS system that let the workshop body come down to ground level for the team’s mechanics. But we haven’t really talked about who those mechanics — and the wider team — actually were.

Race2Recovery started small in 2011, founded by a group of wounded soldiers with a single Land Rover Freelander and a handful of members. Within a couple of years it had grown into a genuine rally-raid outfit: four Wildcat race vehicles, a fleet of support trucks and Land Rovers, and a team of sixteen injured soldiers and civilian volunteers. In 2013 they became the first team of amputees to finish the Dakar Rally, and repeated the achievement in 2014 — a result nobody had managed before.

The team’s association with Blesma, the Limbless Veterans charity, runs right through that story. Blesma supports servicemen and women who’ve lost a limb, an eye, or the use of one, and several of Race2Recovery’s founding members are Blesma members themselves. Tony Harris, who founded and drove for the team, lost part of his leg after being caught in a blast in Sangin, Afghanistan in 2009. Daniel “Baz” Whittingham, part of the truck crew, was an IED disposal technician in the same conflict; the device he encountered broke almost every bone below his waist and eventually led to the loss of his leg below the knee. Phillip Gillespie, another team member, was injured on his third tour with 1 Royal Irish.

It’s worth reading the full page on Blesma’s site — it’s a much better telling of their individual stories than we could manage second-hand, and the team also used their two Dakar campaigns to raise well over £250,000 for military charities along the way.

It puts the hookloader and the workshop body in a bit of perspective, really. The engineering is interesting on its own terms, but it existed to solve a real problem for real people who’d earned the right to be frustrated by a badly-placed toolbox and instead just got on with finishing the Dakar.

Read more: Race2Recovery at Blesma.org