How (not) to spectate at the Dakar

You hear them coming from a long way off. This one’s a Hilux we reckon. The twin turbo V6 engine note is high, savage and thrashy, with a background of frantic gear whine. The best sounding machine out there. Next comes the dust trail, rising from behind a low hill. Then a pinprick of colour, being buffeted and pitched around, wheels loose in the arches.

Suddenly a shout goes up, and a Land Cruiser pick-up hoves into view. Driving the wrong way up the course. Frantic waving and gesturing, but the Land Cruiser is oblivious. The Hilux, flat in top, up over 100mph, is bearing down on it but can’t see it yet. The Land Cruiser finally gets the panicky message from spectators, so starts to pull a lazy 180. Right in the path of the charging Hilux. Double frantic waving. The driver must have caught sight of the Hilux because he stops, but now the race car is forced to evade, locking up and pitching sideways, stones and dust billowing.

I can’t quite believe what I’ve seen. An explosive breath bursts out, my heart’s racing. What have we just witnessed?

Photography: Mark Riccioni and Ollie Marriage

Not much it would subsequently turn out. Later we see one of the Kamaz trucks scatter camels, another truck have a near miss with some articulated ship of the desert, and the next day….

I still shudder when I think about the next day. The spectators competing to get closest, regular Land Cruisers chasing the race cars and trucks through the stage, competitors barrelling one way then the other up and down the same dunes. It’s wild, exhilarating and full-on. Welcome to Dakar, where spectating is an extreme sport.

And so is getting to the stage. We’re in a convoy of Land Cruisers and each and every one wants to be the leader. On motorways it’s diplomatic fast pursuit, all doing 80mph a handspan from the car in front. Maybe they have a thing about aero-efficiency, but then I remember petrol is 40 pence per litre here (diesel, for those that bother, is 10ppl). When we hit dirt they fan out and dice with each other.

Stuff you see on route. This is entrance to the King Abdulaziz Falconry Festival.

And this is the BRX Hunter. The competitors leave the encampment three minutes apart and have to navigate to the stage start. No sat nav, no short cuts, so they’re on the public roads with the rest of us. Of Dakar’s 4,500-mile total distance this year, about 1750 miles were on regular roads. Those aren’t timed sections, but you do have to hit the checkpoints on time.

We get to the start. It’s some flags on a scrubby bit of barren desert. Because the competitors get there with some time in hand, they just mill around with the rest of us. Carlos Sainz is in the middle of that scrum

Then off they go into the wide beyond at three minute intervals. Enough time for the dust to settle so that they can’t just follow each other’s trails.

The trick is then to leapfrog the race so you can watch the cars on the stage. Because the route books for the teams are only given to them that morning, everything is rather secret. We were bundled back into a Land Cruiser and taken out to a remote bit of desert. We asked where we should stand and where the cars would come from. Initially we were told they’d come from the right of this picture. Then it was the left. Ultimately they came from behind (and about an hour later than we’d been told). Which meant we missed the key action: Seb Loeb had caught Nasser Al-Attiyah in the stage and was busily trying to shake him loose so he could pull out a useful lead. Apparently they were just yards apart.

No matter, it’s not like the rest of the field didn’t put on a show. Interesting fact: camel grass, the tussocky humps that have bounced the wheel of this Ford-powered buggy high into the arch are the toughest surfaces for the cars – and specifically the dampers – to cope with.

And no-one’s hanging about. From our vantage point we see the cars for at least 2-3 kilometres and they’re absolutely flat out.

Unless they’re taking avoiding action. Need to make clear that this is a picture I took, not Mark Riccioni, but you can see the possibility of impending doom. The giant articulated mobile home is exactly that, it’s part of a camel herder’s convoy and doing about 10mph. Bearing down on it is one of the 9.5 tonne racing trucks, probably sat at around 80mph.

Let’s get the blur out the way shall we, so we can get back to Mark’s pictures? This was the following day and another snap I grabbed. We saw people burying GoPros in the sand – fair enough – but this chap had his phone on a tripod right in the middle of the track. What must this feel like for the drivers? To come over a dune and have people scrambling for cover?

But then it was a much busier area. Again, it’s hard to know where to head, so what many people do is head to the end of the stage and try to work out where the cars will be coming from. Although we were in the dunes, civilisation wasn’t far away and such easy access meant there were loads of people. And where there’s lots of people, chaos and confusion follow.

Mostly the cars come through singly, but sometimes whole batches come through together. As a spectator you really have to keep your wits about you, because they might not all be coming down the same piece of desert. Most came down the valley you see here, but some came down either side. We quickly realised that there was a GPS waymarker somewhere not far away when we started seeing cars drive the wrong way back up the course – they’d clearly missed it first time round and didn’t want the time penalty.

Stick to ridgelines and you’ve got a better vantage point. A word on wardrobe: you need a rucksack to carry clothes, food and water, and a bobble hat because you’re a confirmed rally fan and can’t be without it. Also, Saudi in January isn’t nearly as warm as you might expect. Single figures when the sun goes down, about 20-22 degrees during the day while we were there.

We walked further into the desert than most of the crowds, and the further we went, the calmer it got. However, that was temporary. Because after about an hour of watching cars, buggies and trucks go through (they run in that order, the bikes and quads run alternative routes), anyone who has a car of their own begins to think “there’s nothing stopping me having a crack at this”.

Then you really have to watch out, because cars, pick-ups, quads and everything else start coming at you from every direction. You feel like you’re caught in the midst of a Mad Max 5: Assault of the Land Cruiser.

Not that everything that goes tearing around the dunes is exactly appropriate.

And even those that are do sometimes come unstuck. Reading the dunes is a skill that not every driver has mastered.

But you do see good stuff.

And you see daft stuff. The Aramco truck was this year’s tech demonstrator, running purely on hydrogen. And towing a bloke on a surfboard. Personally it’s the Unimog in the back of shot that has my undivided attention.

Ah yes, the trucks. You watch the Audis, Toyotas and BRX Hunters come through and it’s astonishing, but then the first truck comes through and it blows your mind. They go every bit as fast as the cars, actually faster in the low dunes because they can see what’s ahead better, and the sense of power and momentum is frightening. Yes, they get air, they also dig huge ruts, pump black smoke from their six cylinder 2000lb ft turbo diesels and regularly catch the small buggies mid-stage.

When all’s said and done it is a crazy, unmissable event, with elements of Group B rallying and Baja as spectators try to persuade cars into near misses and some drivers (both those competing and not) try to put on a show. There are no marshals, no-one to tell you where or where not to go, no guarantee of where the cars might come from or go to. It’s a festival of the absurd, the wild and unpredictable. I adored it.

Oh, and when we left our driver decided that what he really wanted to do was not get back on the highway, but drive along the stage itself. Right through the finish line. Cue arm waving fury from the time keepers and sheepish ducking down from the rest of us on board.