I only found out very late in last year’s event, but full TV coverage of the Dakar is freely available online. What’s more, the commentary is by Toby Moody, virtually everyone’s favourite motorsport commentator.

You’ll find it right here, thanks to Australian broadcaster SBS. That stands for Special Broadcasting Service, fact fans.

So you can go and watch Nani Roma’s massive roll on stage 2, if you’ve not seen it yet. And pretty much everything else that’s happened so far, for that matter.

It’s well worth following @tobymoody on Twitter too, for photos and other interesting behind the scenes morsels, as he follows the rally across South America. He really does seem like a splendid man.

Meanwhile, Carlton Kirby is once again voicing the Eurosport coverage – which the likes of me don’t get on Freeview. There are daily highlight videos on the Eurosport website, which he doesn’t voice, but they’re shorter and less informative than the SBS coverage.

It is worth reading the Q&A Carlton Kirby kindly did with me last year though, covering the Dakar and other subjects. He seems like a thoroughly splendid man too.

The official Dakar live tracking is invaluable, providing updates at each checkpoint in the day’s stage. Actually, the Dakar website as a whole is rather good, and the breaking news area isn’t much slower than the live tracking, but with the benefit of explaining why, for example, someone’s dropped 20 minutes.

So there you go. No excuses for not being up on what’s happening in South America, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.