Inside Dakar Rally: Behind the scenes at motorsport’s most excessive and spectacular endurance occasion the place drivers dance with demise and defy human limitations for final glory

There I was, stranded in the Saudi Arabian desert, with zero access to the internet, surrounded by used tyres and a rocky mountain range, and only the beautifully raspy tones of Stevie Nicks keeping me sane in a hotbox of a car – having no idea where I was or where to go.

This was the moment I realised the extremities that Dakar Rally competitors endure every day.

However, while I was in a four-wheel drive Chinese motor, which my host and I nicknamed ‘Herbie’, and had access to a motorway nearby, rally drivers only have a self-made navigation system, like a compass, to guide through the endless mounds of sand.

It was the opening day of Dakar Rally, arguably the toughest test motorsport has to offer, a rally race like no other that lasts just under two weeks in the Saudi desert, with over 800 competitors pushing their bodies to the limits in sunny summer-like conditions.

We were searching for our viewing point for the Prologue, a 22-kilometre timed ride that serves as a qualification round, to catch a glimpse of bikes, cars, and buggies ripping through the sand at unimaginable speeds.

After over an hour of being lost, ping, we suddenly got signal. Back onto the motorway we went, not knowing the chaos that awaited us.

In the next 20 minutes, the police halted traffic on one side of the motorway to allow us to make a U-turn, we were then left in a cloud of dust by our guide on the dangerous and rocky route to our viewpoint, with my host hitting the gas so hard in an attempt to keep up with them that it felt like ‘Herbie’ was about to come off its axle.

It was bonkers but brilliant. Our own Mini Dakar. A glimpse into what competitors endure.

24 hours earlier, I arrived in Yanbu naive to the grandiose but crackers nature of the event. Did I know it was dangerous? Yes. But did I know the lengths that drivers and riders had to go through, before and during the rally, just to finish the thing? Not in the slightest.

Just six hours in the Bivouac, the monstrously big mobile camp that acts as a base for drivers, mechanics, and teams, taught me that this grand event is both one of the most challenging and savage not only amongst the world of motorsport, but in sport as a whole.

As Carlos Sainz, four-time Dakar champion and rally icon, tells Daily Mail Sport: ‘Dakar pushes the limits, you have to respect the race before it starts.’

And he’s bang on, the race commands respect. It’s a 15-day slog, consisting of qualification and 13 stages of racing, in which a vast array of vehicles have to self-navigate thousands upon thousands of kilometres of open desert and treacherous terrain.

Two weeks of putting your foot down is a long time, right?

Just think, in the same time frame, a Premier League team could feature in four matches across domestic and European competition, a period that could change the course of their entire season. And I guess it is the same in Dakar, there are twists and turns like no tomorrow.

Still, despite all the drama, you’d think that after roughly 8,000km and 49 hours of driving, there would be a clear winner.

Wrong. The 2026 motorcycle race was as dramatic as ever, with Red Bull KTM factory rider Luciano Benavides beating out Honda rival Ricky Brabec to the crown by just two seconds, completing one of the greatest comebacks in the competition’s history.

Imagine that? 49 hours of riding across the desert, just to be separated by two measly seconds. You just can’t write that stuff; it’s almost a script straight out of a film that is so far-fetched that nobody would believe it was possible.

What makes the plot even more nonsensical is that the Argentine had a serious knee problem coming into Dakar, sustained at Rallye du Maroc, which nearly ruled him out of the competition entirely.

If that doesn’t epitomise the unhinged and maniacal nature of the enduro rally racers tackling this heart-stopping spectacle, I don’t know what does.

The Dakar Rally has been running for 48 years. It came about when French motorcyclist Thierry Sabine was forced to send it on his bike through the dunes of Africa after getting lost in Libya.

He had so much fun that a year later, in 1978, he launched the international rally event that began in Paris, France, and ended in Dakar, Senegal. It has continued year after year, taking on new routes and terrains in every instalment. After stints in both Africa and South America, the race now runs in Saudi Arabia, where it has been since 2020.

Now it’s bigger and better than ever, with bikes, cars, buggies, and even trucks, pushing the limits as we have never seen before across scenery that is reminiscent of a Windows loading screen.

It may be a marathon, not a sprint, as proven by the eventual car category winner Nasser Al-Attiyah of the Dacia Sandriders – the Red Bull athlete triumphed for the sixth time following a gradual rise through the rankings at each stage – but man, do these vehicles still hit some ferocious speeds.

The fastest cars can hit up to 170 km/h repeatedly, over long stretches, on terrain that looks like it should be crawled upon, not driven at full throttle.

These daredevils risk their lives for days on end just to even finish the event. Winning it or simply getting on the podium is almost a bonus.

‘For two weeks, we have to push in the desert,’ nine-time rally world champion and Red Bull-sponsored athlete, Sebastian Loeb, tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘One of the important things is to reach the end, which is not always easy. You need to push the limits in some places but also avoid destroying everything in the wrong places.’

These riders and drivers are allergic to the idea of giving up, even when the going gets tough. A man who embodied the Dakar spirit more than any other this year was last year’s motorcycle champion, Daniel Sanders.

The Australian Red Bull KTM factory rider was in prime position to retain his Dakar title, which he cruised to last year, when stage 10 came along.

138km into the stage, with everything on track, one monster dune changed everything. As Sanders led his front wheel off the peak of the mound, not knowing what was on the other side, he careered down a huge drop and crashed heavily into the sand.

Broken collarbone. Broken sternum. Broken dreams. That should have been Sanders’ race run. But no, after the help of rival Brabec, who gave up his lead over Benavides, which would eventually cost him dearly on the final stage, he got back up and finished the stage.

‘We don’t quit,’ Sanders said after arriving at the Bivouac battered and bruised. ‘Mum and dad didn’t raise no quitter, so I’m not pulling out now until someone else tells me to pull out, or they drag me out of the race. I’m not stopping.’

Sanders was broken physically, but not mentally. Somehow, defying the capabilities of what a human body should be able to do, he finished the final three days of riding with just one working arm, finishing an incredible fifth place overall.

Dakar competitors, and Sanders in particular, are what we Gen Z writers would describe as built different. Tough as nails. Warriors forged in the chaos and carnage of dust and rocks.

Another who can be described in a similar vein is two-time Dakar bike champion and two-time world rally champion, Sam Sunderland.

Upon my first handshake with Sunderland, I almost forgot who I was talking to. This was a man who had almost torn his body limb from limb during a historic career tackling the gnarliest dunes and terrain the planet has to offer – each scar having its own story to tell – and yet, he was the coolest, calmest dude in the whole of Dakar.

But that sums up rally racers. They do things that 99 per cent of the population would steer clear of because they don’t want to risk death, and to do that, you need to be mentally resilient. You need to quieten the voice in your head telling you to stop.

When eating the finest cut of lamb that the Bivouac has to offer, while the sun is setting on the Saudi desert in the distance, Sunderland recalls to Daily Mail Sport an occasion during the 2022 Dakar Rally – the year of his second and final title – where his body and mind almost gave up on him in tandem.

‘Day four, it was,’ the Red Bull athlete starts. ‘I’m lost on this plateau, looking for this waypoint. I’m looking down at the GPS trying to check if a little number changes to say that it’s validated.

‘I’m lost, and there are other riders looking around as well, and as I look down, I hit a rock, like a big one. Big crash, knock myself out. I pick the bike up, and I’m hurting. I’ve hurt something in my neck; I felt like I broke something. It was so painful.

‘Get back on the bike. I’ve got no rear brake. I’ve got no front brake. Now my handlebars are bent, and I still have 150 kilometres of stage to race. It’s day four of the race, and I still have eight days in front of me.

‘The first 50k when I got back on the bike, I was at the bottom of the barrel, searching for motivation. I had this Angel and devil in my head saying ”stop, you’ve got kids at home, you’re going to hurt yourself again, you’ve already lost five minutes, what the f*** are you doing to yourself?”.

‘Then on the other side, “come on, dude, just try and do 10k, if you can do 10, you can do 20. You didn’t go to the party. You went to run when it was p***ing rain. You didn’t eat that food”.

‘So all of those things that you sacrifice along the way, you rely on them when things get tough.’

There is an argument to be had that Dakar tests an athlete’s brain like no other. They have to maintain focus for 15 days, battle various demons, and navigate a route they have never driven before, where all they see are acres of nothingness.

Navigation is perhaps the most challenging part of Dakar. That may sound ridiculous, given that drivers and riders nearly die putting such strain on their muscles and bones, but to win the event, you need to have good navigation skills.

Competitors don’t even know the direction they are meant to be driving until the beginning of each stage. They have to follow a roadbook created by the organisers, who scope the terrain at a measly 30 km/h – compared to their rip-roaring speeds – which spell out waypoints that racers have to validate.

Cars have a driver and a co-driver, with the co-driver providing instructions on direction via two tablets on their side of the vehicle. Imagine attempting not only to read but also to explain directions in a desert while being chucked around the car like a rag doll.

Meanwhile, bikers are left on their own. They have to read the navigation on a tablet while dealing with dunes on a frame with no roll cage, which won’t protect them if they crash. They do, of course, get lost, which is not only dangerous to their hopes of winning but also to their livelihood.

Sunderland found that out while riding in the blistering South American heat a decade ago.

‘I’ve been lost before,’ he starts. ‘I’ve got my helmet off, my earplugs out, listening for bikes, trying to understand how to get out.

‘I was leading, it was 570km. So I’ve been racing for like six, seven hours at that point, and I got lost like 50km from the finish. And I got lost for two hours, and it was 48 degrees.

‘I remember hallucinating. I was so buggered that I would see other bikes when I’d finally found my way back, and I didn’t think they were in the same race as me. I was just cuckoo.’

As I left the Bivouac in Yanbu for the final time, with the sound of drills and revving engines no longer piercing my eardrums as teams packed up and left for the next stage in AlUla, I felt humbled and honoured.

The Dakar Rally may well be the most chaotic but spectacular event on this earth.