The 47th edition of the Dakar Rally is set to be one of the most hotly contested in years. Four full factory programs will be up against each other in the Arabian desert as Dacia, Ford, Toyota and Mini put their cars and crews to the absolute limit.
While much of the focus will rightly be on the fight at the front of the field, some of the closest action will happen further back, among the swathe of privateer crews who, for decades, have passionately and loyally made the Dakar what it is today.
Big budget teams with the best drivers will invariably always make the biggest headlines but the Dakar remains to this day an aspirational event for many young and amateur crews alike.
It’s why customer teams such as Century Racing, Red-Lined Motorsport and MD Rallye Sport exist. It’s hard, it’s expensive and sometimes it doesn’t always make sense. But the love for the sport is something that cannot be explained easily.
Julien Hardy has been at the head of Century Racing since its first assault on the Dakar back in 2007 and knows the travails of the privateer outfits. A former racer himself, the Mauritian has spent the last 27 years in South Africa, a hotbed of the rally raid world, helping budding professional drivers and ‘businessman’ amateurs live out their dream in affordable machinery.
“If you are a factory team and have an unlimited budget then you have halved your problem,” Hardy tells DirtFish. “We try to cater for small privateer teams with, let’s say, ‘gentleman drivers’ who want to live out their dream of an adventure. Ideally, they want to take two or three mechanics to the race, not more than that, so we design the cars with that aspect in mind.
Century Racing's cars are a familiar Dakar sight with drivers such as Serradori
“Although I have worked hard in the past, I’m lazy by nature, and I hate having to service a car in the middle of the night, it’s not my cup of tea. I’ve sweated blood and tears through the night in South America because the car has needed new parts, but today our cars are pretty phenomenal because we need minimal work on the cars.
“I am hoping that we can do a full Dakar without having to touch the suspension. And this is what we all have to keep in mind when we are preparing cars for the customer; they need to be simple, they need to be reliable, and the components need to be robust and do a lot of mileage so that you can serve the customer’s demands.
“In terms of costs running one of our cars on the Dakar, we are one of the cheapest, and it looks like we are also cheaper than a Rally2 car when you look at the cost per kilometer.”
Customer racing is by its very nature, a business, and like all customers, they need to see value for money. After all, motorsport is an investment that more often than not, you never see a return.
What private teams like Century aim to provide, is a platform for drivers to fulfil their potential, whatever that ends up looking like.
“An important factor for us is that we don’t need to win stages like the factory teams, but we want to,” Hardy adds. “So, we try to build a car you can give to a gentleman driver that is easy and comfortable to drive, but at the same one that needs to be capable of winning a stage overall too.
“Brian [Baragwanath] finished second on a stage last year in a car that was only four months old at the time, and that shows that we are on the money. In Morocco, OK we were disqualified [for a torque sensor infringement] but Mathieu [Serradori] passed around 40 cars and was setting comparable times with the top, so we are there or thereabouts.”
We don’t need to win stages like the factory teams, but we want to.Julien Hardy of Century Racing
Century’s business model is pretty straight-forward. It needs to satisfy its customers with a car that is competitive, reliable and has a long shelf-life, all the while keeping production and running costs under a relatively low ceiling. The new-generation CR7, which comes in a turbo and non-turbo variation, has been upgraded to four-wheel-drive in order to keep up with the rest of the T1+ cars while the two-wheel-drive older CR6 continues to sell.
But while Century has the luxury of a bespoke test track a mere 200 meters from its base in Midrand – ideally located between the large cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg – not every privateer outfit is quite so fortunate.
With 13 cars entered for the 2025 Dakar Rally, French constructor MD Rallye Sport has been a staple of the event for over two decades with their Optimus T1+ and boasts the second-largest entry among the privateers, behind Overdrive Racing.
Joan Morel runs the team alongside his father Antoine in Normandy – just a short drive from the iconic Mont St Michel in the heartland of French motorsport activity. Like Century, MD Rallye’s clientele is a mix of professional and amateur crews, meaning the cars require a strong performance-robust ratio.
With the nearest testing facility over 1000 miles to the south, however, the build process is even more important.
“Our Optimus car is the result of 10 years of development with amateur drivers,” Morel explains. “And we build chassis that are more robust that a lot of the main T1+ manufacturers and we are probably more rigorous with our suppliers like SADEV [who supply the gearbox] …we ask them to make parts that will last half a Dakar, without us having to touch them at all.
“We do it this way because we know we have to keep our order books full; our clients need to get something in return for their investment. We don’t have an unlimited budget like the factories.
MD Rallye Sport has 13 cars entering the 2025 Dakar
“When it comes to testing, we need to make sure that everything on the cars is structurally sound and reliable because it is a big displacement for us. Even something like remembering to take things with us makes this part of the development really important for us.
“That’s the big challenge for us, to build cars that are stronger, more reliable than the likes of Dacia, Ford, Toyota etc. With the amateur drivers, yes, they don’t put the cars through the same kind of punishment as the professional drivers – who are maybe changing the pieces every two stages – but at the same time, the amateur drivers make more mistakes that the professional drivers don’t, so it is about finding the balance with the resources we have.”
It’s a similar story with Red-Lined Motorsport, headed up by former Hallsport Nissan customer Terence Marsh, which supplies over 60 cars worldwide, most notably with Chinese driver Wei Han in the T1+ category.
“We used to run just two cars, but as our order book rapidly expanded, we needed to take on more business to cover the capital costs of the first two,” Marsh explains. “Our cars are specifically targeted at the kind of businessman driver, very solid, very reliable.
“And this was our aim when we started, because we had done a few Dakars, we thought: ‘what can we build that is easy to maintain?’ because the customer base around the world, the 35–65-year-old sweet spot as we call it, has a limited resource and experience level. So, you can’t be sending these cars around the world that are absolutely impossible to run and to manage, whether it’s the electronics or whatever, everything needs to be fit for purpose.”
Doing more with less is the motto most privateer teams swear by and unsurprisingly, it’s no mean feat to find that right balance.
Reliability in harsh conditions is a priority for privateers like Red-Lined Motorsport
Having built a strong customer base with its early models such as the VK50, 56 and REVO T1+, Red-Lined Motorsport then centered its attention on the performance side to give newer, more ambitious customers the competitiveness they desired.
“We had built a reputation for strength and reliability, designed and developed the independent rear suspension in the REVO before the regulations changed and sort of wasted two years of hard work on our side!
“With a clean sheet of paper in T1, we decided to get clever and build something that was different to the others. So, we concentrated on aerodynamic simulations and designing the body for efficiency and better cooling.
“And this way we developed an innovative T1 car which was then used as a base on which to develop the current T1+ car when the rules changed at the end of 2022.”
In its efforts to remain competitive while maintaining its modus operandi, Century also went down a two-year rabbit hole when it replaced its trusty 2WD CR6 with the CR7.
In transitioning to 4WD and moving to the turbo version of the Audi engine, Hardy admits the team “lost about two years, just trying to fit around the FIA’s regulations.”
It has also had an impact on customer costs, too.
“It’s clear that you cannot compete in the same way with 2WD as before, and the paying customers still want to compete and they don’t want to get stuck in the dunes, especially when they can have more power, bigger suspensions and 4WD.
Keeping costs under control for customers like Serradori is challenging
“But everything is getting a lot more expensive, the fact that it is the world championship is one aspect, that there are more big factory projects is another. But the overall cost of competing on the Dakar is also becoming extreme in my view.
“A lot of our customers have converted from two to four-wheel-drive, even Mathieu Serradori who had been hanging on in the 2WD this year, he feels he needs to upgrade and there’s no question the 4WD is quicker, but it costs a lot of money.
“In WRC, there is more distinction between factory teams and privateers and in rally raid it seems like it’s more of a grey area. After Morocco, we found out that we were going to get nailed if we didn’t run the FIA torque sensor meter [which will become the primary system for monitoring and controlling powertrain performance in Ultimate group cars] on our gearbox for the Dakar, so I had to go to my customers and tell them to upgrade.
“We have a driver from Brazil, Marcelo [Gastaldi] who is amateur but still very quick and he wants the best of the best, so I rang him up and told him to upgrade and that it would cost €20,000, so he pays it. But not every customer will be able to afford that.”
As the Dakar Rally continues to grow, the immortal words of the late founder Thierry Sabine remain as relevant now as they did before the inaugural edition in the winter of 1979.
‘An adventure for those who go, a dream for those who stay behind.’
The Dakar remains an adventure for smaller, privateer teams
And it’s perhaps that aspect of a human adventure that continues to attract hundreds of competitors to the two-week marathon each year, from increasingly more diverse backgrounds. And while manufacturers can come and go, it’s also why privateers simply can’t drop it.
“For us, we spend three quarters of the year preparing for the Dakar and the rest of the time, we operate as a constructor because we have partnerships with other private teams,” says Morel.
“In China, in particular, rally raid is huge, and it is only getting bigger each year. We supply them with cars, equipment and parts so we are operating as two entities during the whole year.
“We also develop and improve our own cars throughout the year too; we’ve just delivered our 37th Optimus which is a great pride for us. When my father started the company in 2009, he could never have believed that we would have this number of cars.
“During the rallies, we will send one or two of our technicians to assist the team on-site, and we normally send a minimum number of parts directly, so that they have everything they need to be able to compete.
“And on the Dakar, although they are amateur, it’s like a professional operation especially making the trip to the Dakar because it is a massive logistical challenge. For them, it costs even more than those who are in Europe, so it is an enormous effort.”
For cross-country fanatics like Century, Red-Lined and MD Rallye, the Dakar is the main event, the Indy 500 or the Super Bowl. Almost all their efforts are taken up by the event. Which is why you likely won’t see them embarking on a full-season campaign in the W2RC any time soon.
Dakar, not the world championship, is still the focus for privateer outfits
“We are not part of the world championship; we don’t have the resources to do that,” says Hardy. “The logistics are crazy, and we can barely afford to do the Dakar. What you put in and what you get out of the other races is not really worth it in my view.
“For events like Morocco, it’s only the guys who are looking to buy a car that will really bother.
“But the Dakar is the biggest thing, it’s our biggest audience and biggest marketing tool and we put all of our efforts into that race. If some of the clients want to do other races, we will not dictate where they go or not, we only worry about our factory cars.”
The Dakar remains Red-Lined’s focus, but Marsh is keen to keep his sights on horizons further afield also, building the customer portfolio to meet the demands of an ever-expanding market.
“When I sit down and do the review of what our customers are after, I advise them what car they need to fit their needs,” says Marsh. “We have the GT-R Nissan engine in South Africa and the V8 in Europe, and we get our technicians and engineers together in the workshops, a really professional setup and understand what the customer wants from the rally.
“Once we understand that we can advise the right car and at the end of the day, when the customer is happy, we are happy, and they come back each year.”
The wonderful merry-go-round that is rally raid has an addictive side to it that drags you back without fail. The Dakar Rally is one of these events that continues to deliver the sort of escapism that Sabine so brilliantly devised nearly 50 years ago.
Long may it continue!
