Into the Dusty Madness
The origin story of the Dakar Rally reads like a pulp adventure novel you might read poolside—scripted by wistful romanticism, yet it’s all true. In 1977, French dirt bike racer Thierry Sabine found himself lost somewhere in the vast ochre nothingness of the Nigerien desert. He’d lost the pack of motorcycles he was racing in the Abidjan-Nice Rally, and fear struck his normally fearless heart. You see, not only was he utterly lost, but his compass was shattered. And his watch? Broken. He stared at the two useless hunks of proto technology, then out to the endless dunes of the Ténéré Desert, and winced. For three days he persevered, hoping against logic and thirst that he’d be found. Finally, a helicopter search party spotted the haphazard cross he’d fashioned out of rocks, and Sabine was rescued. Symbolism writ large—and of stone.
But something wonderful washed over Sabine as he sat there for days, mesmerized. With the peak of Emi Fezzan mountain looming in the distance over the surrounding Tchigai Plateau, the awesomeness of the place struck him. He decided then and there, should he survive, to stage his own rally that made this vast stretch of inhospitable terrain its centerpiece. What would have certainly made most men hang up their motorcycle boots instead inspired Sabine to ride headlong into the dusty madness. So he returned to France and organized what would become known as the Paris-Dakar Rally, not knowing his epiphany would soon morph into the most famous rally-raid in the world, and easily one of its most perilous. The “Mount Everest of Motorsport,” as it became known. From near-death experience to inspiration to execution to global recognition—what a tale.
On December 26, 1978, after a year of rushed planning, 182 competitors—80 cars, 90 motorcycles, and 12 trucks—exploded from Paris’ Place du Trocadéro bound for the Senegalese capital of Dakar, some 7,500 miles to the south. The route wound through Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and eventually to the Atlantic coast of West Africa. By the time the dust settled on January 14, 1979, only 74 vehicles survived, the deserts swallowing up more than half the combatants. Despite the hit rate, the Paris-Dakar Rally had announced itself.
The first non-motorcycle across the finish line in that inaugural race was a Range Rover—and a barely modified one at that. Frenchman Alain Génestier, accompanied by co-drivers Joseph Terbiaut and Jean Lemordant, guided the V8 Range Rover Classic he’d bought secondhand through the dunes on the strength of 18 years of experience gained driving across West Africa for a power company. The Range Rover’s prep was comically minimal: three racing seats, an extra fuel tank, slightly reinforced front steering dampers, and a winch… that was reportedly never used. In the qualifying stage in France, they placed a pitiful 80th. In Africa, they blew through the Sahara like sirocco winds.
What would have made most men hang up their motorcycle boots instead inspired Sabine to ride headlong into the dusty madness.
Land Rover following closely behind. They would go on to win the 1984 Paris–Dakar Rally (Photo courtesy of Gigi Soldano Milagro)
Two years later, a Range Rover won again, this time piloted by René Metge and Bernard Giroux, cementing Land Rover’s early dominance and proving Génestier’s original result was anything but a fluke. In short time, Sabine’s ragtag rally-raid blossomed from a fringe adventure for petrolhead lunatics into a global spectacle with genuine factory interest and a rapidly swelling entry list. By 1982, the number of participants doubled from the inaugural edition to 382, including Formula One legend Jacky Ickx. While Ickx’s Citroën failed him that year, the following year he returned to pilot his Mercedes 280 GE to victory. The myth of the Paris-Dakar Rally was now chiseled in stone by F1 hammer.
Through the late ’80s and ’90s the race grew to a staggering scale, attracting hundreds of millions of television viewers across Europe while drawing manufacturers like Porsche, Toyota and Mitsubishi (Mitsubishi’s Pajero would become the most successful Dakar vehicle in history), peaking in 1988 with 603 entries. But disruption struck in 2008 when, after al-Qaeda militants murdered four French tourists in Mauritania, the rally was canceled the day before the starting flag—the first time the Dakar Rally did not run in its 30-year history. From 2009 to 2019 the race moved to South America, before shifting once again to Saudi Arabia. For many fans, the Arabian terrain—including the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, the largest swath of uninhabitable sand desert in the world—recalled the scale and savagery of the race’s African origins.
Defending A Legacy
This January we traveled to Saudi Arabia to witness the Dakar live with none other than Land Rover, which marked its return to the world’s most harrowing race. After the creation of a new-for-2026 Stock category—which allows manufacturers to enter any vehicle they sell in showrooms—Land Rover decided it was time to see how its halo Defender OCTA would perform across the 14 days of the rally. For us personally, there was a little more juice involved. The Dakar has always represented an esoteric manifestation of Adventure itself, born from sitting on my dad’s lap, flipping through magazines, voraciously ingesting images of dust-strewn Porsches, Lancias and KTMs recklessly plowing through unnamed deserts, locals cheering in the background with confused camels and goats in tow. So the goal was not simply to see if the storied British marque could recapture the glory of its early Dakar days, but to witness these scenes with our own happy eyes.
And the steed crafted to test Land Rover’s mettle? The Defender Dakar D7X-R. Utilizing the same 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8, aluminum chassis, and 8-speed gearbox as the OCTA, the D7X-R incorporates some small tweaks such as increased ride height (+1.9 inches), wider track (+2.3 inches), and competition-spec suspension (Bilstein coilovers for the front axle and parallel twin dampers for the rear). Other rally adjustments like enhanced underfloor protection, modified bumpers for better approach/departure angles, and a massive 550-liter fuel tank are also implemented. With a significantly lower price of entry versus prototypes, the idea for the new Stock class is to grow the category so other OEMs like Ford, Jeep, Audi, and GM could potentially throw their 4×4 hats into the ring.
“The vehicle is absolutely insane; the power is not of this world—like that was one thing I was super blown away by,” Team Defender driver Sara Price tells us breathlessly only days after finishing the rally… in second place. Price’s third attempt at the Dakar (the previous two were in the side-by-side UTV category) started off brilliantly, winning the Prologue mini-race. But disaster struck soon after when the D7X-R’s rear control arm snapped on the unforgiving terrain. Unlike other ruthless off-road gauntlets like the Baja 1000, Dakar doesn’t offer teams benefit from official support trucks—instead, huge “Mammoth” trucks carry extra parts for the smaller vehicles. These gargantuan T5.2 lorries, which are also racing themselves, are a thing of utter amazement: glorified garbage trucks blasting through dunes like confetti, hitting air simply unimaginable given their 10-ton mass. So Price had to wait 90 minutes for replacement parts to arrive and then lost another hour installing them with co-driver/navigator Sean Berriman. Overall, the American duo lost 2.5 hours that first day—a death blow in most races.
The Dakar Rally has always represented an esoteric manifestation of Adventure itself.
“I never once thought I wasn’t going to make it that day. I had such a positive view still. This is part of off-road racing, this is what we do, and you have to deal with it!” Price shares with a long sigh. “And that’s Dakar. I always say: ‘You’re only as good as you are on your worst day at Dakar, because it’s a guarantee you’re going to have a bad one.’” What Price and her entire Team Defender team accomplished over the next two weeks was nothing short of brilliant. Each day, bite-by-bite, inch-by-inch, minute-by-minute, they made up time. But to really catch competitors, they simply needed to not cripple themselves again, allowing their nemeses at Toyota to falter—which Toyota did. Meanwhile, Price and Berriman diligently climbed from fifth to second place, securing her first Dakar podium.
“That endurance and consistency [of the Defender D7X-R] is abnormal, especially in a Stock category where you’re usually going to have a lot more issues than any other vehicle because your limitations on building it are very limited,” Price adds. The California-born racer checks major Stock concerns when compared to million-dollar hand-built prototypes, such as far inferior suspensions or sinking in soft dunes due to the weight. “There are times when you can’t check up for things, and you just have to bash through stuff,” she reveals, “and the Defender OCTAs took it like a champ.”
Between watching legs of the actual race, Land Rover distributed stock Defenders to a handful of journalists to experience the dire straits of racing a stock SUV through some of the world’s most treacherous terrain themselves. And while we didn’t near the 90 mph top speeds of the racers, we still ran through stretches of previous years’ legs, challenging stock suspension arms and drivetrains that would surely hobble many other six-figure luxury utility vehicles. One particularly harrowing leg saw us attack a gigantic dune that looked like a life-size sand replica of that wave in The Perfect Storm, and thanks to an orchestration of superior suspension, torque, differential wizardry, and gearing, we managed to pull our Defender 110 X-Dynamic HSE to the top of the hill, sweat pouring from our brows as if we were racing for a championship purse.
Lithuanian racer Rokas Baciuška shared of his simple yet brilliant game plan: “In my mind, I said, ‘Rokas, you have to be careful about the car, especially with stones.’ My mentality was, ‘How far you can see, you push. If you don’t see, you don’t push.’ That’s the main target of the Stock category.” Price’s teammate Baciuška and longtime co-driver Oriol Vidal ran arguably a perfect race, winning every leg of the 14-day rally, eventually capturing first in the category. Overall, the trio of Defender Rally crews—Price/Berriman, Baciuška/Vidal and Stéphane Peterhansel/Mika Metge—notched a flawless 1-2-3 result in 10 of the 13 stages. In other words, true and total Defender domination. “This isn’t a prototype; this is Stock, so what we did this year is incredible,” Baciuška continues. “The target was to bring the car to the finish line, and instead we brought it home with a big trophy.”
“There are times when you can’t check up for things, and you just have to bash through stuff. And the Defender OCTAs took it like a champ.”
Team Defender driver Sara Price
Credit for the stunning success is split among the exceptional D7X-R, the superb Defender team of engineers and crew, and the murderer’s row of pilots Land Rover recruited to their team. The national Lithuanian karting champion in 2010, Baciuška then moved to Italy, where he raced against current F1 Champion Lando Norris. He became the youngest Lithuanian ever to start the Dakar Rally in 2022, and last year he won the World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC), becoming the first driver in FIA history to win world titles in two separate categories. Price herself grew up racing horses in Southern California and switched to dirt bikes, on which she won her first race as a kid (causing much chagrin to all the boys’ parents). Eventually she won no less than 17 national amateur titles on two wheels. She then turned to UTVs and trophy trucks—Price became the first woman to win the SCORE International Trophy Truck Spec Championship in 2019. At her Dakar debut in 2024, she became the first American woman ever to win a stage and only the third woman in its history. Last—but certainly not least—stands Peterhansel, the most decorated of them all, widely known as “Mr Dakar” for his record-holding 14 wins (six on motorcycles and eight in cars). It’s fair to say Defender cut no corners in handpicking its team.
“Every Dakar has a different story. To me, the Marathon Stage is the most enjoyable. Well not enjoyable, but most memorable,” Baciuška shares about the most challenging leg of the Dakar—a grueling two-day, one-night stretch where racers must navigate and make all repairs on their vehicles themselves, without any assistance from support teams. At night, instead of staying at the traveling circus-style bivouacs of the other legs, drivers dine, camp, and converse alone. “You have to prepare your own tent. The landscape—you see the dunes, and the sun going down—it’s amazing,” the Lithuanian champion recalls. “You want to grab a phone and take a picture, but you know it won’t catch what you see with your own eyes. No internet, 200 drivers all in the same situation. Then you see the sunrise; it’s unbelievable.”
Price also named the Marathon Stage among her favorite memories, then added another. “Finishing Dakar this year on the podium in second meant the world to me. I’ve been working really, really hard,” she reveals of another Dakar highlight, when after the backbreaking two weeks of battling, she was finally able to celebrate with the entire Land Rover team. “This year, to finally get the podium was the best feeling I could ever imagine—not only for myself to get my first, but as a new team in Defender Rally. There is so much passion and so many people who’ve invested so much heart into this program. We all work together so hard to make sure that happens, and it’s pretty cool to see that. At the end, we were all in tears; there wasn’t just one person, there were hundreds of us crying.”
This article originally appeared in Maxim’s Summer 2026 issue.
Follow Executive Editor Nicolas Stecher’s travel, spirits, automotive and F&B adventures on Instagram at @nickstecher and @boozeoftheday.