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The Dakar Rally is an off-road racing event where competitors navigate extreme terrain in vehicles like cars, trucks, and motorcycles across challenging desert and remote landscapes. It's considered one of the world's most difficult and prestigious motorsport competitions, testing both driver skill and vehicle endurance over several weeks of grueling racing.
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The Dakar Rally (French: Le Rallye Dakar) or simply "The Dakar" (Le Dakar), formerly known as the Paris–Dakar Rally (Le Rallye Paris-Dakar), is an annual rally organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO). It is a rally raid, an off-road endurance race, traversing terrains notably more demanding than prepared roads used in traditional stage rally competitions, and the vehicles used are purposefully built to perform off-road: cars, trucks, quads and motorcycles intentionally designed to endure cross‑country journeys on unpaved terrain. Most timed competitive segments, known as 'special stages', consist of crossing dunes, mud, camel grass, rocks, and erg. Individual stages range in length from several dozen kilometres to as much as 800–900 kilometres (500–560 mi) per day. Hallmarks of the Dakar Rally are the physical and cognitive demands of prolonged driving, navigation and environmental stressors that the competitors are subjected to. Insufficient experience with desert navigation, mechanical troubleshooting or endurance racing techniques, combined with the fatigue and the rough terrain, often result in accidents and serious injuries.
The event began in 1978 as a rally from Paris, France, to Dakar, Senegal. Between 1992 and 2007 some editions did not start in Paris or did not arrive in Dakar, but the rally kept its name. Security threats in Mauritania led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, and from 2009 to 2019 the rally was held in South America. Since 2020, the rally has been held in Saudi Arabia. The rally is open to amateurs and professionals, with professionals typically making up about eighty percent of participants.