World-class Defending

After five decades, the Dakar Rally has finally attracted a works Land Rover entry. JAMES ATTWOOD joins the Defender team in Saudi Arabia

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The Dakar Rally bivouac is a vast, sprawling, transient community, a ragtag collection of vans, trucks and tents sprouting from the hardscrabble Arabian Desert.

Walking through the camp is like stepping into the world of Mad Max, a disparate cast of thousands tending to a bewildering array of outlandish vehicles, from bikes to buggies and lorries.

But in the middle of that camp for this year's Dakar, there was a little oasis of organised, efficient and very British calm: the service area for JLR's new Defender Rally team, which made its competitive debut on this year's endurance classic as the start of a three-year commitment to the full World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC), which includes four other events.

The Dakar Rally, of course, no longer starts in Paris or goes anywhere near the Senegalese capital: it’s now run entirely within Saudi Arabia. You can have valid moral objections to holding the event there (as with the many other sporting or cultural events the Gulf state now hosts in a bid to burnish its global image), but you can’t argue with its suitability for a rally raid: the vast desert landscape provides plenty of options for the near-5000 competitive miles covered on the 15-day marathon event. This year’s Dakar started and finished near the Red Sea port city of Yanbu, passing close to the capital of Riyadh en route.

While the Dakar is a hugely competitive event at the sharp end, for the bulk of the 600-plus competitors (split among cars, bike, buggies, trucks and a fast-growing class of classics) it’s really about the spirit of adventure. In that sense, it’s a natural fit with JLR’s plans to turn Defender from a Land Rover model line into a standalone premium brand focused on rugged adventure.