WORLD’S TOUGHEST RACE: SA team Toyota Gazoo Racing speaks on Stage 2 of the 2017 Dakar Rally. Image: AFP / Franck Fife
Argentina – South Africa’s Toyota Gazoo Racing speak on the high-speed action following Stage 2 of the 2017 Dakar Rally.
Average speeds at the Dakar rally usually ranges from 90-100km/h but Stage 2 saw an average speed of 120km/h! This is pretty fast considering the terrain.
The stage was won by Peugeot driver Sebastien Loeb , with day 1 winner, Nasser Al-Attiyah (Toyota Gazoo Racing) second.
Team principal, Glyn Hall, and driver Giniel de Villiers gave some insight into how the day’s events unfolded.
Working in soaring heat
Hall: „It’s 43° here in Tucuman and both cars are in. No real problems today. The stage was really unexpectedly faster than we thought it was going to be, so it was a real Peugeot stage.
„Nasser was 1min20 behind (Sebastien) Loeb (Peugeot), who was pushing very hard, and Giniel just 50sec behind Nasser – which I think was pretty good.
READ: Dakar 2017 – Toyota SA continues solid performance in Stage 2
„And we got Nani (Roma) there, another minute behind Giniel and (Stefan) Peterhansel (Peugeot) – who is always a dark threat – 6min30 back. So, I think the big relief for me today is the fact that both cars are here. Especially Nasser’s car after we had to do quite a lot of work on it last night. And everything’s running well.
„There’s no real problems reported from either driver. It’s a case of checking the cars and getting everybody into bed. I think it was 3.30am last night for the team and it was still 35° at 12am. So it was incredibly hot. And 28° this morning when we were just leaving the camp.
„Really tough on the lads, but we’ve got a great team and everybody seems happy. Nasser, I think, was a bit disappointed not to have won the stage when I saw him. But when he thought about it and how fast it was, it was definitely a Peugeot day and Loeb pushing to the limit. “
READ: Dakar 2017 – Team Toyota SA wins opening stage
De Villiers: „Very, very fast stage. Not really suited to us, for the Peugeot’s definitely. The first 100km very bumpy – big ditches and quite dangerous, actually – and the second part was just very, very fast. So happy not to have lost more time than that to the Peugeot’s. And it looks like we’re going at a good speed, so we’ll just have to see tomorrow what happens at the altitude, but so far so good. “
A video posted by Wheels24 (@wheels24_sa) on Jan 3, 2017 at 6:36pm PST

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January 4, 2017
Paris — When the copyright expired on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf at the end of 2015 – opening shelf space for a new critical edition – some Germans worried it would become a hit at precisely the worst time. Some 1 million refugees had entered Germany, stirring anti-immigrant sentiment that has buoyed the once-taboo far-right.
This week, the publisher of “Hitler, Mein Kampf: A Critical Edition” seemed to confirm moderates‘ worst fears, announcing that the two-volume annotated edition was a non-fiction best-seller in Germany last year, just as Hitler’s original was between the two world wars.
But the demand is being driven not by neo-Nazis, the publisher says – rather, by teachers, libraries, history buffs, and those yearning to understanding the parallels between the populism of now and then.
Sven Felix Kellerhoff, a German author and journalist, wrote a book called “Mein Kampf,“ in 2015, tracing the history of a tome whose title is well-known but whose content is not. He says his book and the new critical edition help destroy the enigma surrounding a treatise that is badly written and poorly conceptualized but laid the groundwork for World War II. The original, which outlines Hitler’s hatred of Jews and ultimately led to the Holocaust, was banned at the end of that devastating conflict. But prohibition in more recent times has tended to shroud it in mystery, he says.
“Mein Kampf was dangerous only as a myth, as a rumor, as a so-called ‘banned book.’ Now, with the very good scientific edition and maybe a little bit with my own book, this myth is destroyed,” Mr. Kellerhoff says.
The Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), which published the 1,948-page work, initially planned to print 4,000 copies, and at the time acknowledged the sensitivity around its publication for the first time since 1945. Tuesday it announced it has since sold 85,000 copies and is releasing its sixth edition at the end of January.
„It turned out that the fear the publication would promote Hitler’s ideology or even make it socially acceptable and give neo-Nazis a new propaganda platform was totally unfounded,“ IfZ director Andreas Wirsching said in a statement. “On the contrary, the discussion about Hitler’s world view and how to deal with his propaganda offered the opportunity to look at the disastrous roots and consequences at a time when authoritarian political ideas and right-wing slogans are again gaining followers.”
That sentiment speaks to an entire cultural rethink of remnants of the Reich. While reporting a Christian Science Monitor magazine story last year in Nuremberg, which was contemplating how to preserve the Nazi Rally Grounds, I met Cornelia Kirchner-Feyerabend, a high school history teacher. That day, she was thumbing through an antique edition of an original “Mein Kampf” that one of her students brought in. It was his great-uncle’s, who received it as a wedding gift from his city’s mayor.
She said her own high school teacher would not have dared bring the book into his classroom. At that time, Hitler’s text was treated as something to be locked in the “poison cabinet.” She couldn’t wait to get her hands on the new critical edition , which had sold out quickly.
The book’s debut last year happened to fall just after mass sexual assaults during Cologne’s New Year’s Eve celebration, which was blamed mainly on men of North African and Middle Eastern descent and inflamed anti-refugee sentiment.
At a bookstore at the city’s train station, one customer told me his uncle had asked him to buy him a copy. He refused on the grounds that he wanted nothing to do with Hitler, “that psychopath.”
Another customer admitted he’d be self-conscious about flipping through pages in public because he wouldn’t want anyone to think it was out of contempt for the refugees who have come to Germany. But he planned to buy “Hitler, Mein Kampf: A Critical Edition“ because he saw an opportunity to glean new insights. “You get a chance to learn more about that history, to understand it’s not the truth,” he said.
Mr. Kellerhoff says when he takes his own book to German schools, he always gets the same response: a recognition by the students that Mein Kampf offers only simplistic answers to difficult problems.
”It’s like the refugees. Of course you can say all refugees should get out of Europe,“ he says. „But that is not possible. It’s a simple answer. … This thinking leads to catastrophe.”

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