The 2024 Dakar Rally will combine rocks and sand for more than 4,727 hour kilometers that the pilots will travel during their two weeks in Saudi Arabia and for which the organization has prepared a “surprise”: a 48- time phase of the marathon that will leave them. alone.the pilots, who will sleep in tents and have “military-style” food rations.
The test director, David CasteraThis Monday revealed the route of the five categories that will travel to Saudi Arabia between January 5 and 19 and that will be the “toughest” of the five years of testing in the country, with long specials that will start the Dakar until it reaches the ‘Empty Quarter ‘, the most inhospitable desert area on the Arabian Peninsula, where you will return to Ryad, before driving back to the Red Sea.
He Dakar Rally 2024, which will have categories of cars, motorcycles, trucks, Challenger (T3) and SSV (T4), will start in AlUla and end in Yanbu. It will begin with a prologue on the 5th, after two days of verification.
The first stage already promises more than 530 timed kilometers, one hundred more than the second, where the sands will be the protagonists of this competition that celebrates its fifth year in Arabia.
After two stages where you can “shoot” something else, the sixth day will now enter the “Empty Quarter” and, according to Castera himself, it means “a remembrance of the African epics “, with an infinite phase and a phase of 48 hours .
These almost 600 kilometers on the sands covered in two days will return the runners to the essence of Dakar, which in fact will have to join one of the eight bivouacs prepared: a sleeping bag, a tent and a traditional style food military personnel will be with the pilots.
When asked by some of them, like Stéphane Peterhansel, who has fourteen victories in the Dakar, the French emphasized that this type of stages “when there is more unity, when there is talk between colleagues ” and “where good moments come from.”
Swede Mattias Ekström also celebrated that “something good” was included, while Spaniard Carlos Sainz highlighted that it “adds a little salt and pepper” to the competition and assured that it will be ” one of the stellar episodes.”
Castera pointed out that this will be the last stage before the day of rest that will take place in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where the future of the energy transition will be addressed, after the integration of Audi with hybrid machines or the ideas of some driver. which came with hydrogen powered vehicles.
In fact, he announced the creation of the Dakar Future Mission 1000, a “laboratory” to learn how to reduce emissions. He noted that ten vehicles have been selected that will cover up to a thousand kilometers in a sustainable manner to open “a new dimension of the Dakar with a clean vehicle.”
It will open in the second week, which will vary the sands with stones and where it is planned to settle in AlUla two days after leaving Riyadh and, from there, perform two more stages before finishing in Yanbu, on the coast of the Red Sea.
The arrival of 354 vehicles is expected to pass through this complex route, which will also form the framework for the first test of the third season of the World Rally Raid Championship (W2RC): 137 motorcycles and 10 quads for the FIM and, according to that there are new name adopted by the FIA, 72 cars in Ultimate (T1 and T2), 42 in Challenger (T3), 36 in SSV (T4) and 46 in trucks (T5).
In the different categories of the Dakar, in motorcycles, the current champion, the Argentine Kevin Benavides, or the Chilean Pablo Quintanilla stand out among those registered, in addition to the Spaniard Joan Barreda, who now year is changing teams at Hero.
In the car category, the indomitable Carlos Sainz is preparing with his Audi for his seventeenth participation in the legendary race, where he will have as one of his main competitors the Frenchman Stéphane Peterhansel and also the Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah, who this year. He moved to Prodrive, where he will share a team with Sebastian Löeb.
For his part, in quads, Frenchman Alexandre Giroud will look for the triplet, after winning in 2023 and 2022, while Dutchman Janus Van Kasteren will be the main rival to beat in the truck category.
The Dakar race (initially called Paris-Dakar) began in 1977 and was held in Africa between 1978 and 2008 (when the organization had to leave that continent due to the jihadist threat), in South America between of 2009 and 2019 and in Saudi Arabia since 2020.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Rose Herman and I work as an author for Today Times Live. My expertise lies in writing about sports, a passion of mine that has been with me since childhood. As part of my job, I provide comprehensive coverage on everything from football to tennis to golf.
