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Mirjam Pol will not race the Dakar Rally in 2024 as she continues to recover from a bout with COVID-19.

“The Dakar rally is the longest, toughest, and most dangerous rally in the world that demands the utmost from the team, the pilot and the material,” wrote Pol on Friday. “With the risks we deal with on daily base during the Dakar we need to be one hundred percent fit and focused and I’m still far, far away from that.

“I now have reached a point where I have to make a decision. Am I able to go to Dakar like this or not? And if I’m even a tiny bit honest towards myself, it’s not a choice at all, it just won’t work. So no Dakar rally 2024 for me.

“For now I will give my recovery the time it needs and after that I’ll try to get fit again. And then somewhere during next year – depending on my recovery – I will make some new plans, with of course… the Dakar 2025 rally.”

2024 would have been Pol’s eleventh career Dakar. She is the only woman to have raced the Dakar in all three locations (Paris to Dakar, South America, Saudi Arabia), making her debut in 2006 and being the best-performing female competitor in the 2009 and 2022 editions. The 2023 Rally, her tenth to qualify for Dakar Legend status, saw her finish twenty-ninth overall in the Rally2 category and forty-ninth among all bikes.

After racing a Honda at the Dakar Rally for ten years, Joan Barreda will make the switch to Hero MotoSports for the 2024 edition. Hero had announced a partnership with Monster Energy two days before confirming Barreda, himself a Monster-sponsored athlete.

Barreda was previously a member of the Monster Energy Honda Rally Team before becoming a privateer for the 2023 rally, though he continued to race a Honda CRF450 with the factory team’s blessing. Competing under the Monster Energy JB Team banner, he won Stage #4 before his Dakar ended with a crash and fractured lumbar vertebra four legs later; Barreda was eighth in the general ranking prior to his retirement. Ironically, Hero won that stage with Barreda’s new team-mate Ross Branch.

Partly because of his injury, he did not run the rest of the World Rally-Raid Championship after Dakar. Honda also leased their independent bike to fellow Spaniard Tosha Schareina, who impressed by winning the Desafío Ruta 40 in August.

The forty-year-old hopes the move can provide him with some better fortune. Although he has thirty stage wins, just three short of the record for a bike set by Stéphane Peterhansel and Cyril Despres and twice as many as the next active rider (Toby Price‘s fifteen), Barreda has never finished higher than fifth in 2017 and 2022. During his decade at Honda, he had four top-ten finishes while retiring five times, mainly due to crashes brought upon by his notably aggressive riding style.

Hero is a relatively young factory team in the top level of rally raid, but was competitive with Branch in the 2023 World Rally-Raid Championship. Branch finished fourth in points with three stage wins, including two at Dakar. The team’s other full-time rider Sebastian Bühler suffered a litany of mechanical problems that led to an eleventh-place points finish. Joaquim Rodrigues only raced at Dakar due to injuries. All three riders will remain with the team in 2024.

The 2024 Dakar Rally‘s bike category will enjoy a triple Czech infusion as Orion – Moto Racing Group‘s trio of Dušan Drdaj, Martin Prokeš, and Jaromír Romančík have all been accepted for the race after their performances at the Rallye du Maroc in October. The trio will be making their Dakar débuts.

Prokeš is no stranger to Morocco, having raced the 2022 edition but failed to finish due to crashes. Fortunately, his 2023 attempt yielded better results as he and his team-mates each completed every stage. Romančík finished an impressive seventh overall in the Rally2 class, followed by Drdaj in twentieth and Prokeš in twenty-eighth.

“Compared to the Dakar, [Morocco] is a short but intense rally,” commented team manager Ervín Krajčovič after the third stage. “No one wants to underestimate anything, so they race for blood from the first meter. For the fact that the boys are running their first long-distance race, they are doing very well.”

Besides a top ten in his maiden World Rally-Raid Championship start, Romančík narrowly missed out on winning the Road to Dakar, which would have earned him free registration for Dakar, by just 7:35. Romančík led the Road to Dakar for the first three stages before a malfunctioning roadbook and crash in Stage #4 caused him to lose the top spot to Toby Hederics.

In missing out on the waived entry fee, Romančík—like many privateers heading to Dakar—is running a fundraiser to help pay for it. As of this article’s publication, it has generated 32,600 koruna.

Many bike riders were suddenly left perplexed with little time to react when their electronic roadbooks malfunctioned during the Rallye du Maroc in October. This forced the competitors to scroll through the roadbook manually by hand while riding, a doable but inconvenient task especially among those jockeying for the World Rally-Raid Championship or using the race to prepare for the Dakar Rally.

“After 120 kilometres, my tablet completely shut down,” recalled Rally2 rider Dušan Drdaj, whose roadbook failed in Stage #4. “The screen went black and I was just following the tracks. When we took it [off the bike], it was rattling.”

Developed by ERTF, the digital roadbook is intended to be a replacement for paper. Electronic roadbooks present advantages such as not using up as much paper while organisers can make necessary adjustments automatically, though others prefer paper if they feel the digital screens are too difficult to view in sunlight or the system is susceptible to glitches as was the case in Morocco.

ERTF has two global positioning systems for W2RC competition: the Unik 2, which can be used in tandem with a paper roadbook, and the Unik 4, a fully digital system. The Unik 2 is present in the top-level RallyGP class and among Rally2 riders who are competing for W2RC points, whereas Quad riders and non-championship Rally2 competitors can only install Unik 4 on their vehicles.

David Castera, director of the Dakar Rally and Amaury Sport Organisation, released a letter to all riders on Thursday hoping to “silence the rumours aimed at slowing down the roll-out of this electronic tablet.” Digital roadbooks are already mandated for drivers and co-drivers in the FIA categories, all of which utilise the Unik 4 system.

Julien Dalbec did not get what he hoped for when the Amaury Sport Organisation emailed him in July saying he needed more desert rally raid experience if he wished to run the 2024 Dakar Rally. Three months later, he was easily able to change their minds upon completing the Rallye du Maroc.

Making his World Rally-Raid Championship début, Dalbec finished twenty-sixth overall in the Rally2 category and just missed the top ten among Road to Dakar entrants. The Road to Dakar is a programme that rewards riders who have never raced the Dakar Rally with free registration if they win the class at any of the four W2RC events or other participating rounds.

Dalbec competed on a KTM 450 Rally for Nomade Racing. He recorded three consecutive finishes of twenty-fourth across the first three stages, which he improved upon in Stage #4 with a twenty-first. The fifth and final leg was marred by an hour and fifteen minutes of penalties for missing a waypoint, leaving his final time at 22:37:12. If not for the penalty, his 21:20:12 would have been good for twelfth overall and third in the Road to Dakar.

Nevertheless, the effort more than impressed the ASO into reversing their ruling. Various classmates were also rejected during the initial rider selection process in July but had those rulings overturned in Morocco including Bruno Leblanc and Gioele Meoni.

A motocross rider from France, Dalbec finished thirteenth among bikes at the unrelated Morocco Desert Challenge in April.

Ford‘s NASCAR Cup Series challenger will receive a facelift for the 2024 season as the company introduces the Ford Mustang Dark Horse. It is based on the Mustang Dark Horse production car revealed in 2022, replacing the Mustang GT.

The Mustang Dark Horse is part of the seventh generation in the long-running Mustang line; unlike its predecessors, the Dark Horse is a performance-based model, the first for the Mustang since 2001. The racing-specific Dark Horse R is capable of competing in GT3 and GT4 categories and is used as the base for Ford’s Supercars Championship and Formula Drift divisions.

“If she gallops as fast as she looks, it’s going to be a good year,” RFK Racing owner/driver Brad Keselowski stated. “Mustang is an iconic American car made famous around the world. I think of how Mustang has evolved over the years and how NASCAR has evolved along with it and they’re just two brands that go together. I’m proud to get to drive it and proud to be able to compete for the win in this car.”

Perhaps the most notable trait on the Dark Horse is the flared front fenders, which when coupled with the flatter nose is intended to provide improved aerodynamics when drafting. Such modifications help Ford stand out from their rivals at Chevrolet and Toyota, which can be tricky to pull off due to the strict regulations of the Next Gen car.

“Where you are within that box is still important,” commented Ford Performance motorsport head Mark Rushbrook. “Repositioning as you can to truly optimise that, every little bit of performance counts. But there’s also a lot of performance that simply isn’t characterised in that submission process of how the cars are truly race on these variety of tracks, as well as trade-off decisions that are made in terms of drag versus downforce.

Growing up, Gioele Meoni dreamed of racing the Dakar Rally alongside his father Fabrizio Meoni, a two-time winner of the legendary event. This was tragically never realised as Fabrizio passed away after crashing in the 2005 edition, but Gioele hoped to continue his father’s legacy two decades later.

On Wednesday, the door to his goal was blown wide open as the Amaury Sport Organisation overturned their initial rejection of his application and accepted him onto the grid for the 2024 Dakar Rally. He was denied during the rider selection process in July due to a lack of desert rally experience, which he fulfilled in October when he competed in the Rallye du Maroc.

His time in Morocco was short lived as he dislocated his shoulder in a Stage #4 crash caused by losing control of his bike while navigating a mountain, though he had shown solid pace prior to the retirement. He quickly impressed by finishing twentieth in the Rally2 class in the opening stage, and repeated the finish two days later in Stage #3 with a thirty-third sandwiched in between. Prior to the accident, he was sitting twenty-third in the overall.

“In those ten minutes after falling, the sacrifices of an entire year had passed before me, made to find myself there, at kilometre 150 of the penultimate stage of the Morocco Rally with a dislocated shoulder,” recalled Meoni. “Months of waking up at 5:00, of intense training to the detriment of family and work, months of travel and meetings with the fear of not finding the budget.

I had already shown in the previous stages that the race pace was constant and was in the top 30, but it might not be enough. These thoughts crowded in my mind.

Monster Energy and Hero MotoSports have joined forces for the 2024 Dakar Rally and World Rally-Raid Championship, both parties announced Wednesday. The team will be Monster’s second in the top-level RallyGP bike category alongside Monster Energy Honda Rally Team.

“We are super pumped and proud to team up with Monster Energy,” reads a team statement. “It’s a brand-new chapter for us, and we’re beyond excited to rev up the adventure together. This partnership symbolises our commitment to pushing the boundaries, taking on bigger challenges, and racing the limits.”

Hero, the only Indian factory team in RallyGP, fielded two bikes in the 2023 championship for Ross Branch and Sebastian Bühler. Branch placed fourth in points with a best finish of fourth at the Desafío Ruta 40 (third among W2RC competitors) and Rallye du Maroc, while also scoring three stage wins. Two of the wins came at the Dakar Rally, his first at the legendary race since 2020, while the third was in Morocco where he led the overall for the first half. Bühler’s season was plagued by mechanical failures that forced him to retire twice and he settled for eleventh in the standings.

Branch was already a Monster Energy athlete who previously competed for Yamaha’s Monster-backed programme before joining Hero for the 2022 season onwards. Joaquim Rodrigues also has Monster support; he broke his femur at Dakar that sidelined him for much of the season, followed by a shoulder injury in testing right before the finale in Morocco.

In adding Hero, Monster Energy is now on equal footing in RallyGP with rival Red Bull, who supports the KTM and GasGas factory teams.

King of the Hammers competitors are more than familiar with racing in deserts, and while the race’s upcoming project is in a desert, it will be on pavement instead. On Tuesday, Spencer Boyd announced the race will sponsor his #12 Chevrolet Silverado for Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event at Phoenix Raceway.

KOH is the premier rock crawling race in the world, taking place every late January to February in Johnson Valley, California. It is the opening round of Ultra4 USA, whose owner American Outdoors Events oversees a growing portfolio of off-road racing properties that includes Great American Shortcourse, MidAmerica Outdoors, and the newly formed AOE Pro and Regional Series.

“NASCAR is a huge stage and we are excited to introduce their fans to our event,” said King of the Hammers founder Dave Cole. His Hammerking Productions also created GAS, which began its 2023 season at KOH. “King of the Hammers is a stage of tremendously diverse racing, with something for everyone.”

The 2024 King of the Hammers will run from 28 January to 3 February.

“I love racing, period,” commented Boyd. “When we started talking about putting this partnership together, there was a mutual level of respect for the style of racing that we both do. I’m honoured to represent these fellow racers on the NASCAR stage in Phoenix. And I thought I was dirty after dirt racing at Bristol, but apparently that is clean compared to how these guys look at KOH.”

Mathieu Feuvrier grew up following the Dakar Rally when it ran from his native France to Dakar in Senegal. While the race now takes place in Saudi Arabia, his interest persists and he hopes to tackle the legendary rally in 2025. His roadmap to get there has included the 2022 and 2023 Rallyes du Maroc, the final race of the World Rally-Raid Championship, and the path only grew clearer upon reaching the finish at the latter.

Feuvrier finished forty-sixth in the 2023 Rallye du Maroc’s Rally2 class, his début in the category after placing seventh in Rally3 at the 2022 edition. He had back-to-back runs of fifty-eighth in the first two stages, the latter coming despite an early roadbook malfunction that forced him to scroll by hand; other riders like Bruno Leblanc, who earned his ticket to the 2024 Dakar Rally with his Morocco performance, also experienced the same issue. He finished a position higher in Stage #3 of fifty-seventh.

The fourth stage, the longest of the rally, proved to also be the hardest which prompted Feuvrier to race conservatively. This ultimately paid off as he avoided penalties and errors and finished fifty-first. He ended the rally with a forty-first in the fifth and final stage.

Feuvrier described the race as a “pleasure from start to finish”. Such a performance, along with his past qualifications like the 2022 Rallye du Maroc, would have already been enough to be accepted for the 2024 Dakar Rally though he elected to continue for another year to further train and refine his skills.

As a privateer, he also plans to use 2024 to gain more sponsors. Outide of rallies, he competes in sand races like the Enduropale du Touquet, where he finished 583rd overall in the 2023 edition. Fellow Dakar aspirants like Marshall Méplon, Maxime Pouponnot, and Sébastien Herbet raced alongside Feuvrier at the Enduropale du Tuoquet followed by Morocco.

Ryan Blaney might be competing for a NASCAR Cup Series championship, but he’s certainly going to be jealous of his best friend’s ride for the season finale at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday. To commemorate sponsor Columbia Sportswear‘s upcoming collaboration with Star Wars, Bubba Wallace‘s #23 23XI Racing Toyota Camry will feature a special livery resembling an X-Wing starfighter.

The car was revealed Tuesday with a guest appearance from Mark Hamill, who portrays series protagonist Luke Skywalker. Wallace’s helmet and firesuit for the race are modelled after those worn by Rebel Alliance pilots; Jays Racewear, who produced the suits worn by pilots and other military personnel in the original trilogy, also specialises in making suits for motorsport.

The Incom T-65 X-Wing is the lead starfighter in the Rebel Alliance fleet, appearing in all three films of the original trilogy. A successor model, the T-70, served the same role for the New Republic and Resistance in the sequel trilogy. The prequels, theatrically released between the two trilogies but takes place prior to both, did not feature the X-Wing line though the ARC-170 was the Republic Navy’s choice of all-around fighter before its template was used by Incom to develop the X-Wing. As such, the X-Wing’s silhouette is one of the most recognisable vehicles both in-universe and in real life.

Wallace’s car is based on the Rebels’ T-65, sporting red stripes along the sides to reflect Red Squadron, the unit that Luke served in at the Battle of Yavin in the first Star Wars film released in 1977. The lower front quarter panel features the S-foil wings that can open and close for combat, creating the X shape that is synonymous with the X-Wing. The dual 4L4 fusial thrust engines at the rear can give off the impression of tail lights, which are not used in stock cars, for those unfamiliar to the sport.

An astromech droid, particularly an R2 unit designed after R2-D2, appears on the roof next to the number.

Chevrolet‘s reign as the most successful marque in NASCAR continues for another year, this time in even more convincing fashion. Following Sunday’s Martinsville Speedway weekend, the company clinched the manufacturer’s championship across all three of NASCAR’s national series—Cup, Xfinity, Craftsman Truck—for the first time since 2012. It is also the first manufacturer sweep since Toyota in 2016.

“Chevrolet is honoured to win the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series Manufacturer Championship for the third consecutive year and the forty-second time overall,” said Jim Campbell, racing vice president for General Motors. “This title is the result of great teamwork by the Chevrolet drivers, crew chiefs and teams working tirelessly throughout the season.”

Entering the season finale at Phoenix Raceway, Chevrolet has won forty-seven of the eighty-nine national series races run in 2023. The Camaro delivered seventeen wins each in the Cup and Xfinity Series, while the Silverado notched thirteen victories in the Trucks.

At the Cup level, Hendrick Motorsports leads the way with ten wins courtesy of William Byron (six) and Kyle Larson (four). Richard Childress Racing‘s Kyle Busch added three, Trackhouse Racing Team has two from Ross Chastain and Shane van Gisbergen, and A.J. Allmendinger scored one for Kaulig Racing. Byron’s six wins leads all Cup drivers, and he and Larson will represent Chevrolet in the Championship Round.

The seventeen Xfinity wins are split between JR Motorsports (eight), RCR (four), Kaulig (four), and Jordan Anderson Racing (one). Sam Mayer and Justin Allgaier each have four wins with JRM, as does Austin Hill at RCR which are all tied for the second most individually. Allmendinger and Larson contributed two and one win, respectively, while Jeb Burton is responsible for JAR’s maiden win. Chandler Smith of Kaulig was the lone rookie to win a race. The JRM duo will vie for the Xfinity title at Phoenix.

While Sean Hingorani pursues an ARCA Menards Series West championship, he will also continue to dip his feet into the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. On Friday, he will pull double duty at Phoenix Raceway by running the ARCA West title decider followed by the Truck season finale, the latter in the #75 Chevrolet Silverado for Henderson Motorsports.

Hingorani made his Truck début at Milwaukee in August, finishing twenty-third for Hattori Racing Enterprises. The start came in the midst of an ARCA West championship hunt, and he currently leads the standings with a series-high four wins and a thirty-point advantage over Trevor Huddleston.

He also raced for the ARCA Menards Series West title, though a one-race suspension for reckless driving in the national ARCA Menards Series at Mid-Ohio ruined his hopes of also notching a title there. Hingorani finished seventh in the ARCA East standings with a best finish of third on four occasions.

Although he has exclusively raced Toyotas in ARCA and ran his first Truck race in a Tundra, the deal to race a Chevrolet for Henderson came together via Kyle Busch Motorsports. KBM, one of the top teams in the Truck Series, will disband at the end of 2023 as their assets are sold to Spire Motorsports.

Hingorani will be Henderson Motorsports’ fourth different driver since their arrival in the Truck Series in 2012, joining Caleb Holman, Parker Kligerman, and Sam Mayer. Kligerman has been the part-time team’s main driver since 2017, winning twice and running seven races in 2023 with a best run of ninth at Talladega. The team has never attempted a race at Phoenix.

The Silk Way Rally is looking to cross borders once again in 2024 by including Mongolia and China on its route. While the specific route will not be revealed until later in November, interest in expanding beyond Russia has persisted as COVID-19 restrictions lax. Race officials completed route evaluation on Sunday.

While the rally is organised and mainly held in Russia, it has made excursions outside the country since the inaugural edition in 2009 when it concluded in Turkmenistan. It ran a Russia-only route for the next six years before adding Kazakhstan and China in 2016, ending in the Chinese capital of Beijing. Mongolia débuted as a host country in 2019, welcoming the rally for five stages before it travelled to and finished in China. The pandemic forced the 2020 race to be cancelled while its return in 2021 exclusively took place in Russia.

The race’s global standing was further diminished in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relegating it from featuring a global roster of drivers to mostly Russian and Belarusian competitors. A joint investigation between Bellingcat, The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde in April also uncovered attempts by race organisers to link the rally to Russian geopolitical goals, most notably a massive 2022 route that included stages in China, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Syria, and Turkey; every country has some degree of friendliness with Russia, whereas Turkey walks a tightrope between Russian trade and its NATO membership. Such an ambitious plan was quietly dropped and the SWR remained in Russia for 2022.

Nonetheless, Chinese interest in the SWR has remained strong; while China has officially maintained a neutral stance on the invasion, relations between the two powers have increasingly warmed in recent months. The Chinese Automobile and Motorcycle Federation follows the FIA policy of barring Russian drivers unless they condemn the war, which prevented 2023 Silk Way Rally T3 winner Sergei Kariakin from entering the Taklimakan Rally in the spring, though this has not deterred Russo-Chinese interactions in the rally world.

KAMAZ-master, a Russian powerhouse who has won the Dakar Rally’s truck category a record nineteen times, has fielded a Silk Way entry for Chinese driver Hou Hongning since 2022. The truck is entered with support from the CAMF under the One Belt One Road name, a nod to China’s Belt and Road Initiative economic policy to cultivate foreign trade and development along the historic Silk Road.

Last week, Vadim Pritulyak led a pair of wounded Ukrainian combat veterans across Europe to participate in the Rallye TT Cuenca, the Spanish Cross-Country Rally Championship‘s season finale. Racing a new Ukrainian UTV called the SKARLAT 1000, the SKARLAT-XTRM Team of Pritulyak and Sergey Romanovsky set the fastest time in the ParaBaja category across the weekend. Olexandr Gonzul completed the race in a Toyota FJ piloted by Ivan Barbero.

The ParaBaja class is designed for people with disabilities like limited mobility; as a non-competitive category, finishers are celebrated regardless of how they did, though times are still kept for scoring purposes and drivers are required to follow standard rally regulations. Romanovsky lost his right leg while fighting pro-Russian forces in fall 2014, while Gonzul’s left arm and right leg were blown off by a land mine in July 2022 five months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country. Pritulyak wears an eyepatch over his right eye due to thrombosis and vision loss stemming from an accident in 2018, though he noted it pales in comparison to the disabilities that his classmates have.

“After finishing first and surpassing all the competition in the second stage, I approached one of the participants and noticed that the steering wheel was equipped with devices where the driver operated them with his hands, including the gas and brakes on the steering wheel,” recalled Pritulyak. “I spoke with him, and after that, I approached the organisers, and we decided that all participants in ParaBaja would receive identical trophies because it turns out that I’m the only one without a particular limitation. Well, there are some problems, and my navigator also has a disability—he’s missing one leg—but we’re overtaking people who are paralysed in the lower part of their bodies, and it doesn’t seem very sportsmanlike. So, everyone was awarded the same trophies.”

The team’s journey to Spain came together with the help of partners like Autolife run by Vladyslav Kushchynsky, a rally raid driver who oversees the Automobile Federation of Ukraine’s technical committee and coordinated with his Spanish counterparts at the Real Federación Española de Automovilismo to invite wounded Ukrainian troops to race as co-drivers in Cuenca. KLO, a domestic gas station chain, also came aboard as a sponsor; one of its stations in Kyiv was destroyed by Russian shelling in the early days of the invasion, and the site was used by the team’s supporters to send them off. Rafał Sonik, the 2015 Dakar Rally Quad champion who helped Ukrainian refugees in Poland, greeted them upon their arrival in Kraków followed by Dakar T1 driver Miroslav Zapletal in Prague as they continued westwards. Romanovsky recalled the night crossing into Poland had some delay but “both the Ukrainian and Polish sides reacted very positively to our mission and helped us.”

Upon reaching the ceremonial start podium in Cuenca, they brought out the flags of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Air Assault Forces; Romanovksy served in the latter. Romanovsky then called the shots for Pritulyak, an ex-Dakar competitor on a bike, in the SKARLAT. Pritulyak hopes the effort will drum up foreign investors into the marque, which is developing UTVs for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to evacuate injured troops from the frontlines. They raced the car in its four-seater form, albeit without passengers in the back, while spare tyres were placed in the trunk.