One of the key focal points in the race is safety. When a rider has spent 40 hours on their bike with no sleep, they often fall asleep on their bike! This is fine when its on a lonely dirt road, but obviously another story on a busy tar road. So most of our 'detours', while they may seem like a stuff around, they are really because we want to avoid the above scenario. As an example, the two tar sections before RV2 in Britstown, and RV3 in Loxton. In both cases the route turns onto tar roads, and then within a kilometre, turns back off the tar road into the veld, on a farm track. These are easy turns to miss for a rider. So these sections would be red flagged for you guys, and the minute you see a rider missing this turn, you alert the 'chain of command' and we try and get hold of the rider, or inform the rider when he gets to the RV that he has a time penalty. This is a working idea, but that is pretty much the gist of it. We don't have the resources to monitor every rider over 24 hours over those sections, hence reaching out.
