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In 2005, Guerlain Chicherit made his Dakar Rally début with Mathieu Baumel as his co-driver. Nearly two decades later, the two will rekindle their relationship, even if for just one round, when they enter the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid. Baumel fills in for Alex Winocq, who is recovering from a back injury sustained during the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge.

“Fifteen years after our last partnership, Mathieu and I will share the same car at the Rally-Raid Portugal,” wrote Chicherit on Tuesday. “We started racing in the discipline together in 2005 and experienced extraordinary adventures, sometimes going as far as to sleep alone in a small tent in the middle of the African desert… Another era! We are delighted to meet again for this one-shot.”

After finishing forty-ninth at the 2005 Paris–Dakar Rally, Chicherit and Baumel impressed in 2006 with a stage win and ninth-place run. The two continued to work together through 2009, finishing ninth again in their final Dakar together.

Baumel eventually linked up with Nasser Al-Attiyah in 2015, and the duo formed one of the greatest pairings in rally raid history as they won four Dakar Rallies, two World Rally-Raid Championships, four FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Rallies, and the 2023 FIA World Bajas Cup. They also claimed five Middle Eastern Rally Championships and the 2015 World Rally Championship-2.

However, things soured at the 2024 Dakar in January when Baumel and Al-Attiyah, running their first W2RC race in a Prodrive Hunter, struggled with reliability before dropping out halfway. The two split a month later and Édouard Boulanger became Al-Attiyah’s new co-driver starting with the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, where they ultimately won. Baumel did not appear at Abu Dhabi as a result.

After a decade of success together, Toby Price‘s time with Red Bull KTM Factory Racing has come to an end. Price confirmed his departure on Tuesday, explaining the team opted not to renew his contract following the Dakar Rally in January. His focus for the rest of 2024 will be on the SCORE International World Desert Championship.

KTM initially gave him an extension in October, which theoretically would have kept him involved through at least the entire 2024 World Rally-Raid Championship. However, as the manufacturer undergoes reshuffling and budget cuts, the team did not register for the 2024 championship, making Price and team-mate Kevin Benavides ineligible to earn points.

In his final race with them at Dakar, Price finished fifth overall in the RallyGP category. While he did not win a stage, he scored three podium finishes with a third in Stage #5 and runner-ups at the Chrono Stage and on the final day. KTM did not appear at the next W2RC round in Abu Dhabi, though every RallyGP team save for Hero MotoSports sat out that round.

“I do feel like I’m still in my prime and going out there fighting for wins, especially at Dakar so it’s unfortunate to not have that opportunity to do it in 2025 but I’m really appreciative of the support they gave me in my career,” wrote Price. “We’ve been able to do something great things together like win two Dakars and get a couple podiums, a World Championship and our success in Australia too.”

After winning a stage and finishing third in his Dakar début in 2015, Price became a KTM factory rider the following year and immediately made an impact by winning the race. He added the FIM Cross-Country Rallies World Championship (predecessor to the W2RC) in 2018 followed by a second Dakar victory a year later.

Kenjiro Shinozuka, a World Rally Championship race winner and the first non-European driver to win the Dakar Rally, died Monday morning after battling pancreatic cancer. He was 75 years old.

“For the past three weeks, Kenjiro has been working hard to fight the Sahara Desert. At 10:10 AM on March 18, 2024, he crossed the finish line at Lac Rose,” reads a statement from his publicist.

Lac Rose was the traditional finish line for the Dakar Rally during its original run from Europe to Senegal. While the race has not used this route since 2008, Shinozuka could have followed it as part of the Africa Eco Race in January but was forced to abandon those plans after a sponsor backed out. He first raced the AER, co-created by the late three-time Dakar champion René Metge, in 2019 where he finished thirty-fourth.

The AER entry came twelve years after his final start at the Paris–Dakar Rally in 2007. Shinozuka made his debut in 1986 as a factory driver for Mitsubishi. In 1997, he and co-driver Henri Magne led a Mitsubishi Pajero/Montero podium sweep when they defeated Jean-Pierre Fontenay and Bruno Saby; fellow Japanese driver Hiroshi Masuoka made it a 1–2–3–4 for the marque in his Challenger.

Shinozuka joined Nisan in 2003, but was involved in a frightening wreck in that year’s race which resulted in life-threatening injuries. He recovered in time for the 2004 Rally, and contineud to race until 2007.

Formula 1 heads to Melbourne for Round 3 of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship this weekend, as Max Verstappen aims for his 3rd win of the season.

Racing returns to Albert Park for the 2024 Australian Grand Prix, this weekend and it will be Verstappen that everyone is aiming to beat. The Dutchman has picked up where he left off in 2023, and has secured both pole positions and both race wins so far this season. Including 2023, he’s on a nine-race win streak.

Despite that, the main storylines for Oracle Red Bull Racing have been their off-track political drama. The latest reports suggest that a Red Bull employee has filed a complaint to the FIA regarding the Christian Horner incident. The Horner drama has led to reported arguments within Red Bull, with tensions high between senior figures such as Helmut Marko and Jos Verstappen and the team principal. 

The drama hasn’t affected the performance of Verstappen or Sergio Pérez though, and it looks like that won’t be the case this weekend either as Red Bull enter the weekend as strong favourites.

Carlos Sainz Jr. could return to F1 action this weekend after missing the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix due to needing surgery for appendicitis. He returned to the paddock in Jeddah following the surgery and watched Ollie Bearman score points on his Scuderia Ferrari debut.

Season 51 of the SCORE International World Desert Championship will begin with the thirty-seventh San Felipe 250. Luke McMillin is seeking his third straight win for Four-Wheelers while Ciaran Naran hopes to go back-to-back for Moto.

Qualifying for Trophy Truck categories will take place on Thursday, 21 March, followed by race day on Saturday, 23 March.

The Course

As is tradition, the race will begin and end in San Felipe. At 285.59 miles for the Pro classes (284.86 miles for Sportsman), the course is longer than in 2023.

At RM 90, the bikes and quads will go take a bypass that splits them off from the Four-Wheelers. Sportsman categories will also join them on this route at RM 162, and both will eventually merge back on course at RM 178. The physical checkpoint awaits just past the 200-mile mark.

The bikes split off again at general RM 270, taking them further south near El Carrizo and a run north along Highway 5 before rejoining at RM 278. Of course, the actual deviation is much longer than the two points marked, stretching roughly eighty miles.

Although unable to compete domestically for obvious reasons, Ukrainian racers have still found applications for their driving abilities elsewhere. Thanks to a partnership between the Automobile Federation of Ukraine and the Ministry of Defence, drivers are now leading classes for military personnel in how to drive safely in off-road environments during emergencies, such as heading to and from the frontline.

As part of a feature aired Monday, DniproTV joined the Khartia Brigade, a unit in the National Guard of Ukraine, at a course in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast taught by Andriy Yaromeko. Yaromeko leads the PILOT Safe Driving Centre, a Cherkasy-based driving school that, with the help of the FAU, has expanded to include satellites in Poltava and Dnipro.

In 2022, he represented Ukraine at the FIA Motorsport Games in France, competing in Auto Slalom with Tatyana Kaduchenko as his team-mate. The duo ranked fourteenth in the preliminaries to be among the sixteen teams advancing to the knockout stage, where they were defeated by Latvia in the opening round and placed thirteenth of twenty-five overall.

Lessons go beyond simply driving fast and smart on dirt roads. Before going to the test track, Yaromenko puts soldiers-slash-students in the classroom where he teaches them concepts that might seem trivial but go a long way in practice such as hand placement on the steering wheel and how to mitigate back pain from sitting for too long.

The course duration varies but typically lasts four sessions. All troops may attend for free, while costs are covered by sponsors and the FAU.

Frédéric Vasseur, the Team Principal at Scuderia Ferrari, has revealed they opted to put Oliver Bearman in their SF24 during the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend rather than Antonio Giovinazzi due to the Italian’s busy schedule outside of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship.

With Carlos Sainz Jr. unable to race due to illness that ultimately was diagnosed as appendicitis, Ferrari required a last-minute replacement to take over the driving duties ahead of final practice, and FIA Formula 2 racer Bearman was chosen to make his Grand Prix debut at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit.

Ferrari could have opted to bring in an experienced driver such as Giovinazzi, who is part of their reserve driver roster, but with the Italian competing in the FIA World Endurance Championship, it was decided that neither he, nor Robert Shwartzman, would be considered just a week after competing in their primary series.

“I took the decision in the winter because I found it a bit stupid last year to ask Antonio to do 22 or 24 races when he was doing in parallel the LMH programme,” Vasseur is quoted as saying by PlanetF1.com.

“The LMH is quite important for us – it’s a huge challenge – and I don’t want to ask Antonio or Shwartzman to travel with us and to do F1 the week after Qatar [the WEC season-opener], and a race in between.

The Desafío Ruta 40 returns to the World Rally-Raid Championship in 2024 as the penultimate round, albeit two months earlier than last year as it takes place in June. The race will span roughly 3,213 kilometres total with 2,085 km being Selective Sections.

Córdoba’s Complejo Ferial Córdoba will serve as the rally’s base of operations, marking its first time racing in the eponymous province. The second largest city in Argentina, Córdoba previously hosted legs of the Dakar Rally when it ran through South America, including being the finish in 2018.

After a sixteen-kilometre Prologue, longer than the nine in 2023, the main race begins with a 466-km loop around the city. Stage #2 takes competitors to San Juan, which hosts a loop of its own for Stage #3. San Juan previously welcomed the Dakar from 2010 to 2012 and 2014 to 2018. San Juan’s bivouac will be based at Circuito San Juan Villicum, a race track visited twice annually by Argentina’s Turismo Carretera and formerly by the Superbike World Championship.

Stage #4, the longest with over 500 kilometres in timed sections, heads to La Rioja. Boasting six Dakars to its name, La Rioja was also the site of the opening stage for the 2023 DR 40. The bivouac is at Estadio Superdomo de La Rioja, a basketball arena and concert venue.

The race returns to Córdoba on the final day.

Craig Lowndes has tackled many of Australia’s greatest races from the Bathurst 1000 to the Bathurst 12 Hour. In June, he will add the country’s top off-road event to his résumé when he tackles the Finke Desert Race in a Chevrolet Silverado ZR2 Off-Road Racer with Dale Moscatt as his navigator.

While Lowndes is obviously renowned for his Supercars Championship career as a three-time champion with seven Bathurst 1000 victories, he is not unfamiliar with off-road racing. In 2010, he dabbled in rally raid for the first time when he entered the now-defunct Australasian Safari. Despite being new to to the discipline, he and his Holden Colorado scored the overall win. Lowndes returned to the event in 2011 but retired following an early rollover while leading.

A decade later, he was invited to the Finke Desert Race to participate in the Prologue. Mark Dutton, the manager of Lowndes’ Triple Eight Race Engineering Supercars team, served as his co-driver in an SSV. Of course, 2024 will be his first time racing the Finke in its entirety.

Lowndes has also expressed interest in racing the Dakar Rally, though such an opportunity has yet to come to fruition. In the meantime, Finke will scratch his off-road itch as a race that has long been a bucket list item. This desire escalated when General Motors unveiled the Silverado ZR2 Off-Road Racer as a concept car in December 2022, which he quickly pressed for the company to manifest into an actual competitor.

The Silverado ZR2 is primarily used in American desert racing by Chad Hall, whose team maintains a close factory partnership with Chevrolet that allows him to also test parts that appear on the production vehicles. Former Supercars team Kelly Racing has a similar alliance with Ford Motor Company to field the Ford Ranger Raptor in Australia and America, culminating in Brad Lovell winning the Production 4WD class at the 2023 Finke Desert Race.

For two decades, Karel Loprais was one of the top truck racers at the Paris–Dakar Rally as he won the category six times in his Tatra 815. In his honour, Tatra Trucks announced Tuesday that they have started Projekt T 162 “Karel”, an effort to build the Tatra T 162.

The Tatra T 162 was conceived in 1988, the same year that Loprais won the Dakar for the first time, as a heavy dump truck intended to replace the 815. Naturally, the manufacturer also hoped to bring it to the Dakar Rally with Loprais. Although a prototype was created, it never entered production and was replaced by the T 163 Jamal.

The Karel, named in tribute to Loprais, is a rally raid version of the 162, featuring a twelve-cylinder engine at the rear; this was designed to help Tatra keep pace with other truck powerhouses at the Dakar like the twin-engined DAF. However, it will be modernised to accommodate for technological advances in the four decades since.

While parent Tatra Trucks a.s. is greenlighting the effort, it is still a side project for employees, which the company analogises to Formula Student programmes at universities. The research and development and technical departments will lead the project. Over two dozen employees are involved.

Loprais, who worked for Tatra growing up, won the Paris–Dakar Rally in 1988, 1994 to 1994, 1998 to 1999, and 2001. His final Dakar was in 2006 before retiring, and he passed away in December 2021 at the age of 72. His nephew Aleš Loprais is also a rally raider who finished runner-up in the 2024 Dakar Rally’s Truck class, though he drives a Praga.

Race two of the 2024 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season is in the books, and we had a familiar result at the front of the field as Max Verstappen took a ninth consecutive win, and the nineteenth in the past twenty races.

There were stories up and down the grid, with Oracle Red Bull Racing taking a second consecutive one-two finish, while Oliver Bearman played a starring role on his Grand Prix debut having only been called up from FIA Formula 2 on Friday morning to replace the unwell Carlos Sainz Jr. at Scuderia Ferrari.

There was also an amazing defensive drive from MoneyGram Haas F1 Team’s Kevin Magnussen, who held up four cars for lap after lap to allow team-mate Nico Hülkenberg to score his first point of the season.

Here is what those on the pit wall had to say after the conclusion of Saturday evening’s race under the floodlights at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit.

Christian Horner – Team Principal, Oracle Red Bull Racing

Race two of the 2024 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season is in the books, and we had a familiar result at the front of the field as Max Verstappen took a ninth consecutive win, and the nineteenth in the past twenty races.

Oracle Red Bull Racing once again dominated, with Sergio Perez overcoming a five-second time penalty for an unsafe release to finish second, while Scuderia Ferrari completed the podium with Charles Leclerc, who also took the bonus point for fastest lap on the final lap.

The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit also heralded the debut of a new star as Oliver Bearman took a remarkable seventh place after being drafted in at the last moment to replace the ailing Carlos Sainz Jr., while Kevin Magnussen played a blinding defensive role as he held up the pack to allow team-mate Nico Hülkenberg to score a point.

Here is what those who missed out on points had to say after the conclusion of Saturday evening’s race under the floodlights in Jeddah.

#23 – Alexander Albon – Williams Racing

Race two of the 2024 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season is in the books, and we had a familiar result at the front of the field as Max Verstappen took a ninth consecutive win, and the nineteenth in the past twenty races.

Oracle Red Bull Racing once again dominated, with Sergio Perez overcoming a five-second time penalty for an unsafe release to finish second, while Scuderia Ferrari completed the podium with Charles Leclerc, who also took the bonus point for fastest lap on the final lap.

The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit also heralded the debut of a new star as Oliver Bearman took a remarkable seventh place after being drafted in at the last moment to replace the ailing Carlos Sainz Jr.

Here is what the top ten drivers had to say after the conclusion of Saturday evening’s race under the floodlights in Jeddah.

#1 – Max Verstappen – Oracle Red Bull Racing

After skipping the 2024 Dakar Classic, Ecurie Frères d’Armes will make their return in 2025 with their flagship 1990 Peugeot P4 joined by a new assistance truck piloted by an all-woman crew.

The team specialises in fielding old military vehicles in cross-country rallies driven by members of the French Armed Forces. Mickaël Ranchin and Philippe Robert débuted the team at the 2023 Dakar Classic, where they finished forty-second overall; Ranchin was wounded by an anti-tank mine while serving in Operation Barkhane in Mali, while Robert is a veteran who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. Team owners Emmanuel and Sandra Rivière also raced the Classic in a 1983 ALM ACMAT TPK truck that finished seventieth.

Although the Dakar Classic is reserved for vehicles built before 1999, both the Peugeot P4 and ACMAT TPK continue to see military use today. The team did not specify what type of truck the all-female team would use, though the ACMAT is of course expected to be an option. Ecurie Frères d’Armes plans to have both veterans and spouses of military personnel on the truck’s crew.

“Building on this success and the experience gained, our volunteers have set themselves the goal of repeating this project in January 2025, opening it to a larger number of beneficiaries,” begins a statement from the team. “Moreover, in order to counterbalance a male crew, it seemed appropriate to give a chance to a female crew. To top it all off, it was necessary to share this extraordinary human adventure with as many people as possible in order to contribute to the recognition of the cause of the wounded.

“In addition, our team has deliberately chosen to focus on three main areas: providing psychological support as early as possible to accompany the wounded from the beginning of the adventure preparation, adopting an eco-responsible approach in the preparation and implementation of the event, and engaging the female crew on a real racing truck.

Ricky Brabec can win on two and four wheels, and this past weekend’s Mint 400 was perhaps one of the finest showcases of his versatility.

Already well established as one of the top American bike racers in rally raid as a two-time Dakar Rally champion, he added both motorcycle and UTV trophies during his weekend in Las Vegas. On Friday, Brabec and Skyler Howes teamed up to claim the Mint 400 Limited Race in the UTV Pro Normally Aspirated class. The following day, he and Preston Campbell dominated the Mint’s Motorcycle Race.

Brabec and Howes are team-mates at Monster Energy Honda Rally Team in the World Rally-Raid Championship. Although they led the RallyGP rider’s and manufacturer’s standings after Brabec won the season-opening Dakar Rally in January, Honda elected not to enter the latest W2RC round, the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge that took place a week before the Mint. With time until the next race in April, the pair decided to head back to America to tackle the Mint.

The two raced the #1991 Honda Talon 1000R prepared by RaceCo-USA, whose owner Jamie Campbell ran the Dakar in a hydrogen-powered UTV developed by Japan’s automotive giants called the HySE-X1. Brabec and navigator Chad Lawson did the first two laps, running what Howes called a “flawless two laps” as Brabec set the third fastest time in class through lap one before improving to second.

Howes and Daylee Holcomb took over for the second half. He suffered a flat tyre during his stint, which he was unable to repair when the jack malfunctioned but managed to save the effort after borrowing a replacement from a competitor whose car also broke down nearby. By the end, the duo’s #1991 finished twenty-sixth overall and beat Honda factory driver Michael McFayden for the class win by seven minutes. His girlfriend Sara Price, who won the same Dakar stage as him in January, finished directly behind him in the overall in twenty-seventh.