The French rider Pierre Quinonero won the first competitive stage of the Dakar Rally in the bike category, and the Spaniard Fernando Gil set the best time in the car class yesterday in Narbonne, France.
The soberness of the in-game menus, which highlight the rally, hillclimb, and rallycross categories available for play, point to the challenge in store, and tempting as it might be to jump into a Peugeot 405 T16 and recreate Ari Vatanen's famed 1988 Pikes Peak ascent (the Custom Events mode makes all content available from the outset), remember this: you are not Ari Vatanen.
The service park in Valence was also much smaller than what had been used in Monaco, so there were no Production World Rally Championship or Junior Rally Championship categories, and fewer entries of competitors.
"I remember thinking, 'this puts us in the weak defense category, doesn't it?' " The rally was held on Oct. 2, 2002, in Federal Plaza before nearly 2,000 people.
Rally's prevailed in the order-accuracy category with an impressive 89.52 percent, while at Del Taco, there was a one-in-four chance the order would arrive wrong.
But after the company announced that it had easily defeated the threat, the meeting quickly became a pep rally, and shareholders' questions fell into two categories: fawning and irrelevant.
Maybe this one game will push the Nets into another category of public treasure that an entire state can rally around.
Veteran rally driver Sebastien Loeb, operating a Peugeot, is leading in the car category, followed by fellow Peugeot drivers Stephane Peterhansel and Carlos Sainz.
Branching out to more general business categories, video conferencing outfits like Polycom are likely to rally.
It would have been disingenuous to declare anyone a real winner this year, though awards were handed out for best designers in several categories during what felt, at times, more like a pep rally than a glamorous event.
