A challenge for those who went. A dream for those who stayed behind.
I never met Thierry Sabine. But when he died, I cried as if I had.
I was 13 years old.
By then, Paris–Dakar had already become part of my life.
Not because I had ever crossed the Sahara or stood beside Lac Rose, but because, like thousands of boys of my generation, I had somehow been transported there every January.
Dakar was different then.
You couldn't open a phone and see where every competitor was. There was no GPS dot moving across a screen, no live timing telling you what had happened seconds earlier, no social media, no permanent connection between the desert and the rest of the world.
Sometimes, you simply waited.
I remember being awake with my father, or going with him to press points where the results from each stage would eventually arrive by telex.
By telex.
Even writing that today makes the world I am describing seem impossibly distant.
A motorcycle, a Peugeot, a Mercedes or a Range Rover could be somewhere in Africa, hundreds or thousands of kilometres away, crossing a landscape we could barely comprehend.
And we were standing in Europe waiting for a machine to print a few lines telling us what had happened.
Who had arrived. Who was leading. Who was missing.
There was something magical about that delay.
We didn't know everything. We couldn't know everything.
And perhaps that was part of why Paris–Dakar felt so enormous.
The desert existed somewhere beyond the information we had about it.
My fascination with Dakar was also inseparable from my father.
He had been a rally driver in Mozambique, and perhaps that was why the race meant something different in our house.
Africa wasn't just an exotic background to motorsport. Rallying wasn't simply something we watched on television.
And every now and then my father would say something that, as a boy, I completely believed:
“One day,
we'll do the Dakar together.”
We never did.
But somehow, every January, it felt as though we were already part of it.
Place Trocadero, Paris-Dakar, 1st Edition, 1978
Lost in the Desert
Like many great adventures, Paris–Dakar began with someone getting lost.
In 1977, French motorcycle racer Thierry Sabine became lost in the Libyan desert while competing in the Abidjan–Nice Rally. For days, he was stranded.
For most people, an experience like that might have been enough to ensure they never wanted to see the desert again.
Sabine saw something else.
He returned fascinated by its scale, its isolation and its beauty. Out there, beyond roads and cities, he had discovered a landscape capable of reducing man and machine to almost nothing. And he wanted others to experience it.
His idea was audaciously simple: create a rally that would leave Europe, cross the Mediterranean, travel through Africa and finish on the Atlantic coast of Senegal.
Paris to Dakar.
On 26 December 1978, the first competitors departed from the Place du Trocadéro in Paris.
Ahead of them were around 10,000 kilometres through France, Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Senegal.
Motorcycles. Cars. Trucks. Professionals. Amateurs.
People with serious factory-supported machinery and others whose greatest qualification appeared to be the conviction that they could somehow make it.
There were no guarantees, and that was precisely the point.
Thierry Sabine, Rally Addjan-Nice, 1976
The Great Unknown
Modern motorsport is built around eliminating uncertainty.
Engineers simulate strategies, analyse temperatures, monitor components and calculate performance to extraordinary levels of precision. Cars communicate constantly with teams. Satellites know where competitors are.
Paris–Dakar belonged to another world.
The route itself was an opponent.
Sand could swallow a car to its axles. A navigation error could cost hours rather than seconds. Mechanical failures had to be repaired wherever they happened, often with whatever was available.
And sometimes there wasn't really a road at all.
Competitors crossed enormous landscapes following headings, roadbooks and landmarks.
A mistake of a few degrees could become kilometres. Then tens of kilometres.
And suddenly the race was no longer about being fast. It was about finding Africa again.
This is fundamental to understanding the early Dakar.
The Sahara wasn't scenery. The Sahara was the race.
Sahara Desert, Morocco
When Almost Anything Could Enter
Look through photographs of the early Paris–Dakar and the field seems almost impossible today.
That is part of its beauty.
There were motorcycles, four-wheel drives, buggies, saloons, trucks, prototypes and machines whose suitability for crossing the Sahara was questionable before they had even left Paris.
The Dakar became an enormous experiment in what an automobile could survive. And the desert was remarkably democratic.
It did not care about the badge on the bonnet.
It did not care how much money had been spent.
It did not care about reputation.
Horsepower helped.
Reliability helped more.
Ingenuity could save your rally, and sometimes the most valuable piece of equipment in the entire vehicle was a shovel.
Yvan Tcherniavsky, Vespa P200E, 1980
Range Rover
The Original Adventurer
The first car victory, in 1979, went to a Range Rover crewed by Alain Génestier, Joseph Terbiaut and Jean Lemordant.
It was an appropriate first champion.
The original Range Rover represented exactly the kind of duality Dakar celebrated: a recognisable road vehicle capable of being transformed into something that could cross a continent.
That connection mattered. The machines in those early years had not yet become completely detached from the cars people knew. You could recognise them. Then Dakar transformed them.
Spare wheels appeared on roofs. Fuel tanks grew. Bodywork was reinforced. Interiors disappeared beneath navigation equipment and tools. Dust covered everything.
Familiar machines became explorers.
Manufacturers quickly understood how powerful that image could be.
Alain Génestier, Joseph Terbiaut and Jean Lemordant, winners of the first Edition
The Brothers
Who Took a Renault to Dakar
Among the great characters of those early years were Claude and Bernard Marreau.
The French brothers became known for doing things differently, and their Renault 20 Turbo 4×4 remains one of those wonderful Dakar creations that seems to embody the event better than any perfectly engineered prototype ever could.
It looked like a family saloon that had taken a dramatically wrong turn.
In 1982, it won the Paris–Dakar.
Think about that for a moment.
A Renault 20 had crossed Africa faster and more successfully than everything trying to stop it.
Only Dakar could make that sentence sound reasonable.
Claude and Bernard Marreau, winners of the 1980 edition on a Renault 20
A Rolls-Royce in the Sahara
And then there were the entries that made even the Renault look conventional.
In 1981, a Rolls-Royce Corniche appeared at Paris–Dakar. Except, of course, it wasn't really a conventional Rolls-Royce underneath.
The famous Jules-sponsored machine combined the visual identity of a Rolls-Royce with heavily modified competition engineering, including four-wheel drive.
It was extravagant. Absurd. Brilliant. And completely Dakar.
The image remains irresistible decades later: one of the ultimate symbols of European luxury charging through the African desert on enormous tyres, covered in dust.
Did it make logical sense?
Not particularly.
Did it need to?
Absolutely not.
Because early Dakar wasn't created by people asking whether something was sensible. It was created by people asking whether something was possible.
Thierry de Montcorgé / Jean-Christophe, Rolls-Royce Corniche, Paris-Dakar, 1981
Then Came the Factories
Adventure attracts competition. Competition attracts engineers. And engineers inevitably ask the same question:
How much faster can we go?
By the early 1980s, Paris–Dakar was changing.
The privateers and eccentric machines remained, but manufacturers had realised that winning in Africa demonstrated something conventional motorsport couldn't.
Victory suggested more than speed.
It suggested durability. Engineering. Reliability. Endurance. And an ability to conquer the impossible.
The desert became one of the world's greatest automotive stages.
Mercedes-Benz demonstrated the capability of the G-Class, and in 1983 Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur took victory.
That one I remember particularly well.
My father and I were huge Jacky Ickx fans. We had followed him through Formula One and Le Mans, and seeing him win the Dakar felt somehow special. We celebrated that victory together.
Perhaps that was another part of Dakar's magic. The boundaries that normally separated different worlds of motorsport simply disappeared.
Here was one of the greatest circuit racers of his generation, a man synonymous with Le Mans, now crossing Africa in a Mercedes G-Class. And winning.
To us, it only made Ickx even greater.
Jacky Ickx / Claude Brasseur , winners, Paris-Dakar, 1983
Porsche Goes to Africa
Then Stuttgart arrived.
In 1984, Porsche entered the 911-based 953, equipped with four-wheel drive for the challenge.
René Metge and Dominique Lemoyne won. But Porsche wasn't finished.
Two years later came one of the defining machines in Dakar history. The 959.
Today we remember it as one of the most technologically significant supercars ever created: twin turbochargers, sophisticated four-wheel drive and engineering that seemed to belong to the future.
Yet part of the 959 legend was forged somewhere that could hardly have been further removed from the autobahn.
Africa.
In 1986, René Metge and Dominique Lemoyne won Paris–Dakar, with Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur finishing second.
A Porsche 959 had crossed the Sahara.
There is something wonderfully unreasonable about that sentence. Again, that was Dakar.
Sports cars became desert racers. Family saloons became expedition vehicles. Luxury cars became off-road monsters.
Trucks became racing machines.
The question wasn't what category a vehicle belonged to.
The question was much simpler:
Will it make Dakar?
Porsche 959, 1st, 2nd and 5th place. Paris-Dakar, 1986
The Human Machine
But concentrating on the cars misses what made the event extraordinary. Paris–Dakar was always about people.
Motorcycle riders travelling alone through landscapes so enormous that another human being could disappear beyond the horizon. Co-drivers trying to navigate while their cars crashed violently across terrain that barely qualified as a road.
Mechanics working through the night to return broken machines to the start the following morning.
Privateers calculating fuel. Competitors digging one another from the sand.
People improvising repairs because retirement could be hundreds of kilometres from anything resembling civilisation.
Dakar brought some of the world's most advanced machinery to Africa and then repeatedly reduced the competition to its most primitive questions.
Are we going in the right direction? Does the engine still run? Do we have enough fuel? Can we continue?
Everything else became secondary.
Alain Rozez / Serge Tallourd, Paris-Dakar, 1988
Sabine
And above all of this was Thierry Sabine.
He understood that he hadn't simply created a race. He had created a dream.
His famous description of Dakar captured it perfectly:
“A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind.”
I was one of those who stayed behind. And I dreamed.
Then came January 1986. During the rally, Sabine was travelling by helicopter in Mali when severe weather closed in.
The helicopter crashed into a dune. Everyone aboard was killed.
Thierry Sabine was 36. I was 13.
I remember crying. Not the sadness you feel when you hear that a famous person has died. I cried as though someone I knew personally had disappeared.
But I had never met him. He didn't know I existed.
It took me years to understand why his death had affected me so deeply. Sabine represented something.
To that boy waiting with his father for news from Africa, he was the man who had opened a door to another world.
A world where you could leave Paris and drive towards a horizon. A world where my father could look at me and say, one day we'll do it together, and I could believe him completely.
Sabine made the impossible seem just possible enough to dream about.
When he died, part of that dream died with him.
Thierry Sabine, Paris-Dakar 1986
The Price of Adventure
Memory has a habit of making the past beautiful. But we should be careful.
The early Paris–Dakar was extraordinary partly because it operated at the edge of what was possible.
And edges are dangerous. Competitors died. Spectators and local residents lost their lives. Aircraft accidents claimed lives.
Communication was limited, distances enormous and rescue operations extraordinarily difficult.
The rally crossed countries and communities that were not simply an exotic backdrop to a European adventure.
As Dakar grew larger and faster, questions about safety and responsibility became impossible to ignore.
We can celebrate the courage, machinery and extraordinary spirit of those years without pretending there wasn't a price, but there was.
The same uncertainty that created the mythology also created the danger and both belong to the story.
Peugeot Changes Everything
By the second half of the 1980s, Paris–Dakar was evolving again, and then Group B ended.
Suddenly, some of the most sophisticated rally technology, engineers and drivers in the world needed somewhere else to go and the desert was waiting.
Peugeot arrived with the 205 Turbo 16 Grand Raid. This was no eccentric experiment conceived in a small workshop.
It was a weapon.
Ari Vatanen won in 1987. Juha Kankkunen followed in 1988.
Then came the Peugeot 405 T16 and another escalation in speed, technology and professionalism.
The great age of the factory desert prototype had arrived.
Dakar remained an adventure. But increasingly it was also an engineering war.
Something had changed. Perhaps inevitably.
Ari Vatanen vs Jan De Rooy, Peugetot vs DAF, Car vs Truck. Paris-Dakar, 1988
Lac Rose
For those who survived the journey, there was one final image. Lac Rose.
The pink lake near Dakar became one of motorsport's most evocative destinations.
After thousands of kilometres of cold, heat, sand, dust, exhaustion, navigation and mechanical punishment, reaching Senegal meant far more than crossing a conventional finishing line. You had crossed Africa.
Look at the photographs.
The cars don't arrive looking prepared for a concours.
They are damaged. Filthy. Scarred. People look exhausted. Paint disappears beneath dust.
Nothing is polished.
Nothing needs to be.
The scars are the trophy, and that perhaps explains something fundamental about Dakar.
Of course winning mattered. But simply arriving mattered too.
The competitor finishing far down the classification might have experienced a greater personal victory than anyone watching from home could understand.
Making the next bivouac. Repairing a suspension component. Finding the route after becoming lost. Helping another competitor. Surviving another day. Reaching Senegal.
The official classification told one version of Paris–Dakar. The stories told another.
And ultimately, those stories became its mythology.
Finish line at the Dakar Beach, Rally Paris-Dakar, 1979
When the World Was Still Wild
Today, almost nowhere feels truly unreachable.
A satellite can tell us exactly where we are. A phone can show us the road. A photograph can cross the planet in seconds. We can follow a rally car through the desert from a screen in our hands. We can know its position, stage time and classification almost instantly.
In almost every measurable way, that is progress.
Motorsport is safer. Navigation is better. Communication is better. Rescue is faster.
I wouldn't wish those advances away for the sake of nostalgia. But something has inevitably disappeared with them.
Waiting. Not knowing. Imagining.
When I think about Paris–Dakar now, I don't first think about statistics or even victories.
I think about distance.
I think about those extraordinary photographs of tiny machines surrounded by an almost infinite landscape.
I think about Thierry Sabine.
And I think about my father.
I can still imagine us waiting for the results of a stage to arrive from somewhere impossibly far away.
By telex.
A few lines of information travelling north from Africa.
Perhaps that is why Paris–Dakar will always mean something different to me.
We never did the Dakar together. But for a boy waiting beside his father, perhaps the promise itself was enough.
Because every January, for a little while, we went there anyway.
Across the Mediterranean.
Into Africa.
Past the point where the roads disappeared.
Towards Dakar.
Towards Lac Rose.
Towards the world Thierry Sabine had shown us.
A world where you could still disappear beyond the horizon.
A world where not knowing was part of the adventure.
A world where a father could tell his son that one day they would cross Africa together, and the son had absolutely no reason not to believe him.
When the world was still wild.
