The Christmas and New Year period means a lot of different things to many different people. But for a bunch of offroading lunatics in every automotive genre, it means a couple of weeks of hard toil, sickening adrenalin rushes and questionable ethical conundrems.
Yes, the Dakar Rally may be one of the global televisual highlights of the international motorsport calender around this time of the year, but there is an undeniable aesthetic and moral difficulty in thrashing one’s fuel guzzler through pristine natural environments populated by excruciatingly poor people.
It may be, as in all things Motorsport, that there are a myriad of ways to justify the event. Each year the rally brings much needed focus and revenue to local economies; car and bike companies use the race as a testbed for endurance, fuel consumption and other technologies that will eventually trickle down to production models and thereby increase the possibility of a sustainable motoring future.
It’s undeniable that these easily spinn-able justifications don’t detract from the fact that untrammeled off-road, point-to-point freedom is an increasingly rare privilege of the super wealthy and the companies they run.
But each year, stone me if we don’t want to go in one of those massive wheeled, über-powered trucks.
So, wether or not you believe this sort of global traveling circus is cricket or not, you can follow the action and battle with your demons via the Dakar Website.
