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Gordon upset with Dakar organisers

Robby Gordon believes that the Dakar organisers should have had a back-up plan to enable the event to go on in some form last week

Organisers cancelled the rally entirely for the first time in its history on Friday due to terrorist threats, less than 24 hours before the rally was set to start in Lisbon.

Gordon, speaking to reporters at this week's NASCAR pre-season testing at Daytona, has been one of the few competitors to publicly criticise the organisers, ASO.

"I'm extremely disappointed in ASO," he said. "I can completely understand their decision not to go to Mauritania, or want to put competitors in an awkward or dangerous situation, but they didn't have a B, C, or D plan.

"The thing I'm mad about is they didn't have a back-up plan, and they didn't give anybody an opportunity to even discuss a plan. They just came in and said 'Alright, the race is cancelled.'"

Gordon agreed with the views of some of his rivals, who believed that the event should have still taken place in some form.

"Why didn't we run 10 days in Portugal on the same course?," he added. "All of the equipment was there. All of the teams were there. TV was set up. All the stuff was done and Portugal is not a dangerous area.

"At the point they cancelled the race, I had 40 people sitting in Lisbon, and 28 of them were going on the rally. We didn't have flights for them, we didn't have hotel rooms, we were checking out the next morning."

Gordon also agreed with those that expect the rally to be well-supported by its competitors in the future.

"The competitors will always come to race," he said. "The problem is how do you get sponsors to sign up now? They (ASO) just completely threw a lot of people into awkward, awkward situations."

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