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The 2023 Dakar Rally is over and, as usual, it has delivered many many stories to think about during the 2 weeks of running.
BONUS TIME WORKS
The 2nd most controversial rule change in rally-raid history has ended up being a clear net positive despite my many fears. When you’re 1st-2nd-3rd-4th-5th on course, the ground you travel is almost untouched (or just touched by random people) so reading the roadbook at speeds sometimes exceeding 70mph average can be extremely tricky so, for the past 10 years or so, motorbike riders have been kinda scared of this so they would bite the bullet and lose whatever time needed so they’d have a partner so nobody needs to be reading the notes all the time. This created WILD fluctuations in the overall standing and made motorbike riders look rather bad.
This year the ASO and FIM created a rule where being top3 on course for the first couple of hours of any stage would give you some small time bonus back… and the fluctuations slowed down quite a bit. We no longer saw stage winners somehow finish outside of the top15 the following day. Skyler Howes and Mason Klein even managed to be 1st on course end to end once each. Obviously I’d prefer for things to happen naturally rather than need an artificial rule but, in the end, things have definitely improved.HOW TIGHT CAN IT GET!?
Maybe the distance-difficulty combo made the stages not challenging enough but it’s rather remarkable that, after almost 45 hours of timed sectors, a total of SEVEN riders finished within 30 minutes of the winner. I am old enough to remember when 30 minutes wasn’t that much of an advantage, now it’s enough for a rider to drop from 1st to 7th. All this happened the very first edition that the lead changed on the FINAL day of one of the main 3 classes (motorbikes, cars and trucks) with veteran Toby Price losing almost a minute against a hard-charging Kevin Benavides and missing out on the bigger heavier touareg trophy by only 43 seconds.DISTANCE MATTERS
It’s almost ironic how the ASO, organizers of some of the most famous road cycling pro events in the World including the Tour de France, also organize the Dakar Rally, which somehow follows some rules of road cycling in a weird way. The Dakar Rally and the Tour de France are both events almost bigger than the sport they are part of and in both the length of a stage often matters more than the difficulty itself. Humans and machines can do 3 hour efforts day after day but once you increase that number to 5 and 6 hours things happen, for better (of the fans) or for worse (of the participants).
The 2023 Dakar Rally was the longest in number of days of the past few years but many stages were woefully short. Only one short stage actually had an excuse to be that way since it managed to slow down the best in the World from their typical 50-65mph average to a surprisingly low 45mph. Unless the terrain can make the best sweat bullets, stages have to find a way to extend into the 4-6 hours range rather than the many 3-hour and 2-hour days we had this year.AMERICA’S TIME IS NOW OR NEVER
The USA has never been much into the Dakar Rally or rally-raid as a whole. The mix of multi-day competition, orienteering and the mindfulness needed to traverse a land you’re only seeing on a roll of paper is truly different from what American motorsports fans are used to. Oddly enough, this hasn’t stopped a brilliant generation of riders and drivers to show up in recent years. In motorbikes the veteran is Ricky Brabec but he’s already followed by Skyler Howes and the younger Mason Klein with all 3 fighting for top10 spots every single day and they all at least scored a stage win (Howes was the sole finisher, 3rd place to complete a 1-2-3 of KTM-made bikes). There’s no big American dog in the car class but in the modified UTVs Austin Jones, Mitch Guthrie Jr and Seth Quintero rarely stayed out of the top5 on any given day with Jesse Jones’ kid taking the overall trophy.
Either y’all start caring about this thing or you’re gonna let a very talented batch go to waste. CycleNews, VitalMX, RacerX and such need to get into the Dakar Rally ASAP, it’s absurd that you have 3 of the best 10 in the World and they didn’t get much daily coverage outside of NBC.ONE LAST TIME, NOW WITHOUT THE WIFE
This is probably the “smallest” story I’ll tell you on here but it’s one of the cooler ones for sure. We’ve all heard of great moto kids going nowhere for whatever reason, it happens all the time. What’s unusual is the “wasted kid” resurfacing as a top amateur 20-30 years later. Here’s the story:
Javi Vega was this Spanish enduro fast kid that fell of the racing world as he grew up because the family didn’t have the money to go beyond the 65cc class. 15+ years later he started getting into small rally-raids and eventually managed to get the budget for the Dakar Rally by participating together with his wife Sara García. Sara’s good for sponsorship reasons but she’s rather short and that ain’t exactly great for rally-raids, even with a custom bike and all she has always had problems just reaching the ground on difficult sections. She has eventually gotten too injured to give a damn about the Dakar Rally so Javi decided to race his 5th Dakar Rally but without her in the “originals” subclass (you get a trunk, you fill it with spares, organization moves it for you, you gotta be your own mechanic for the whole week).
After 4 editions caring about his wife’s wellbeing losing countless hours on course and at the bivouac, he went for it and almost managed to beat a much younger man. Javi finished 20 minutes behind South Africa’s Charan Moore and got a 2nd place, which still got him a small touareg trophy. He did all this with a much-modified YZF450 rather than the standard and much more reliable KTM 450 Rally, Hell of a job!UNCERTAIN FUTURE
The bikes class seems to be on the verge of change but, if it happens, it’s gonna be a weird one. Adventure bikes are some of the highest-selling motorbikes but nowadays people don’t buy them to conquer the great outdoors but actually to have a roadlegal motorbike that handles in a less frantic way than nakeds and sport tourers do. Nobody in their right mind would ever ride for 6 hours on a 450cc single-cylinder engine either, all rally-raid bikes in competition are roadlegal but you’ll never ever see one out in the open unless it’s someone training to one day compete.
The future of rally-raid is probably linked to very modified twin-cylinder adventure bikes (the light ones, not the ones that go above 1000cc) with a fairly low speed limit to avoid the insane images (and several fatalities) of the mid 2000s, where the factory KTM LC8 units made 130hp, weighed about as much as a sport tourer and could hit 130mph on sand. I know seeing speed limited to 85mph like in the trucks and UTV classes will be hella awkward after years of riders flying by at over 105mph at times but I’m definitely concerned about the future of the sport now that most of the brands that entered back when the 450cc displacement started have left. We’re back to the Austrian machinery vs Honda with Yamaha-powered Shercos and KTM-powered Heroes in the background.PS: If you like rally-raid, next World Championship round is in just a month. They should post 10-minute highlight videos of each day.
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