The 2020 Dakar is in full swing, and as we pop open our ice cold Mahous and settle in to cheer on El Matador, it seems like a good time to reminisce on the history of the glory days of the event. The early days.

When I was growing up in Northern Virginia I wasn’t like the other kids. I didn’t have much interest in American football or college hoops or the Indy 500. I was more interested in my beloved Formula 1, the World Rally Championship, and the 1000km of Monza. And when it came to the Paris-Dakar I was an early adopter. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to watch the (pathetically incomplete) coverage of the early events which were occasionally rebroadcast from English stations onto our local early cable channels. I was hooked right from the off, and throughout the subsequent years I was obsessed with the Dakar (then known as the “Paris-Dakar”), following every year as closely as possible, and usually purchasing the VHS tape editions of the event from the United Kingdom, which I had to have converted to US format before viewing, months after the rally concluded.

The event has changed a lot over the years. Paris was dropped as the starting point, which reduced the glamour of the event quite a bit, if not the actual meat of the competition. The traditional start time of midnight on New Years Eve was also abandoned. Later, the event was moved to South America over “security concerns” in Africa, and now? The “Dakar” is being held in Saudi Arabia.

It’s still cool, but let’s remember the good old days for a moment. The African days. With Range Rovers and Land Cruisers, Renault 4’s and Citroën 2CV’s, Porsche 953’s and Mercedes-Benz 450SLC’s. The Dakar lives on, but it never got any better than those early, African days…