More dunes and more sand: the Dakar 2023 increases the complexity of the route

From the shores of the Red Sea to the coast of the Persian Gulf, an adventure of 8,549 kilometers awaits the participants of the Dakar Rally in 2023. The main event of the FIM World Raid Championship will start on December 31 with 365 participants and will cross Arabia Saudi from end to end for the fourth time in history.

The route, with 4,706 kilometers of timed specials, will have 15 stages and seeks to increase the technical complexity of the event, which in recent years has focused on speed and navigation.

The big stumbling block on the route will be the marathon stage (11 and 12) drawn in the Rub al Khali desert, which in Arabic literally means empty quadrant.

It is a 650-hectare death trap in the middle of nowhere, a brutally natural territory where the participants will spend four days of maximum demand.

"In this gigantic area, sand is king, and especially in its most majestic form, the dune," pointed out the event's director, David Castera, during the presentation this Thursday.

The incursion into this unknown enclave will be preceded by other already usual locations such as Al Ula, Hail and Riyadh, trodden on every year since the rally's debut in Saudi territory.

Among the outstanding novelties is also the start in an XXL bivouac, a luxury camp by the sea where all the pilots and their teams will sleep before the start of the test.

ASO, the organizing company, thus wants to avoid the attacks that some vehicles suffered last year in the run-up to the rally – an assistance vehicle suffered an explosion from which one person was seriously injured.

This fort will include, among other activities, a soccer field and several table football so that the members of the caravan can relax between technical checks, press events and other obligations prior to the start of the race.

👇 The official route of Dakar 2023!

🚩 Sea Camp - Dammam 🏁

📏 8,549 km (4,706 km of SS)

➡️ #Dakar2023 pic.twitter.com/5NdiwUiYPq

— DAKAR RALLY (@dakar) December 1, 2022

At the sporting level, another element of change is the elimination of neutralizations.

“Before, in the neutralization zone you could see if you were ahead or behind and you could adjust your pace in the second part of the special.

Now we will drive 400 km without any information.

We will have to be focused without rest for 4 or 5 hours and without information on how the race is going”, valued the French Sebastien Loeb, nine times world rally champion and second classified in the Dakar 2022. The organization also seeks to reward the drivers that open each day, since in the past many felt that winning a stage hurt them the next day: they could get lost more easily and those behind could follow in their footsteps.

Now, if the stage winner maintains the lead for the first 200 kilometers the following day,

Castera boasted of having designed a rally divided into two very different parts.

The first week will be fast and technical, but with longer distances.

No stage will drop below 573 kilometres, and the longest will be 877. After the rest day in Riyadh, a second week marked by entering inhospitable territory will begin.

They will be shorter stages, but much slower, a change of pace that will force the participants to adjust physically, mentally and mechanically.

"It will be an endurance rally, you have to find a suitable rhythm and make as few mistakes as possible," Loeb analyzed.

The Frenchman, along with Nasser Al-Attiyah, Carlos Sainz and Stéphane Peterhansel, the three Dakarian champions in Saudi Arabia, starts among the favorites in cars.

In motorcycles, the GasGas of the champion Sam Sunderland will start as a benchmark ahead of the KTM of Kevin Benavides or the Honda army, with the eternal aspirant Joan Barreda in their ranks, but outside the official structure.

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