Highways To The Danger Zone

All forms of motorsport are dangerous, but some are more (much more) dangerous than others.

- Daryl Lee

The Dakar

An ordinary rally is no laughing matter. Hurtling at breakneck speeds through rough terrain (unpaved dirt paths, mountain passes, snowed-out back roads) is tough work, requiring an inordinate amount of bravery and an even greater amount of driving skill.

And rally racers don’t have the benefit of a pit lane stuffed to the gills with experienced mechanics should they encounter a flat tyre or worse while out racing. Any mechanicals must be attended to by the drivers/ co-drivers themselves, and if you can’t continue, well, you don’t race.

However, if you’re the sort who thinks all that is tame – after all, each special stage is only around 30km long and competitors often drive less than 100km a day – then you might want to try your hand at a rally raid. As its name implies, it’s a rally… but on steroids, and the most steroidal, most crazy one of them all is The Dakar, a race formerly known as the Paris-Dakar Rally. It takes its name from the ‘traditional’ finish point in Dakar, Senegal after setting off from Paris, France where it was run from 1978 to 2007.

Unlike a regular rally, which is over in about four days, The Dakar takes about two weeks to complete. Competitors can look forward to around 7,900km of driving, with 5,000km of that being special stages.

The main challenge of The Dakar is the terror of being in an inhospitable environment with no landmarks, limited use of GPS (it’s used mainly for safety and tracking purposes) and extremely long stages that can be in excess of 400km.