Dakar rally trucks never cease to amaze us. Neither do vehicles from the former Soviet Bloc. In that spirit, we present to you footage that involuntarily made us giggle. Seeing a beefcake brick drift a dirt-road corner like that indicates the driver's testes must sport an atomic number somewhere in the transuranic…

Last month, St phane Peterhansel, Cyril Despres and Hans Stacey cemented their status as legends with victory in arguably the scariest, most hardcore event in the world, and yet their wins on an event simply known as The Dakar barely registered a blip on the news. When a ChampCar driver next complains about a bump in…

We're rue to post this clip as the weirdo editing almost makes it a snuff film, but the mind-boggling majestic-ness of the 2,400hp twin-engined DAF over-taking a Peugeot 205 in open-desert trumps all niggling concerns. Seriously, imagine you are an eleven-year-old Bedouin girl tending to the camels when suddenly one…

Watching this clip, replete with melodramatic Ibanez-woodla-ballad guitar, one might get the impression that it's amateur hour out at the Imperial Dunes in eastern SoCal. But it's not. These riders are some of the best in the world, and they were out in the African desert a year ago during stage eight of the Dakar…

We dig minicars. We also dig Italian cars. And we dig the Dakar Rally very much. Fiat, knowing this, has decided to enter two 4x4 Pandas in the Dakar Rally. They turned the diminutive hatch into a panel van, filled it full of goodies helpful for survival in the desert, and left the 105-horse 1.3L turbodiesel alone.…

With the flag due to drop on the Dakar Rally on the 6th, we thought we'd whet your appetite for what is surely one of the most badass automotive events ever invented. Below the jump is a musically-soundtracked video that's all trucks. And yes, Loverman, rest easy, as DAF is represented.

We've heard of ethanol (made with corn!) switchgrass-derived stuff, sugar cane-derived stuff and even biodiesels like fry oil. But this is a first for us. It seems a Japanese research team plans to enter a race car in the Dakar rally that runs on cooking oil used to fry tempura. The turbo-engine Land Cruiser 100,…

Seeing as it's already Day 4 of the Dakar Rally and we've been lax in posting about the goings on over on the Portugal-Senegal run, we thought we'd toss out a link to Hog Wild Racing's blog. Scott Whitney and Duane McDowell are a couple of Southern California sidecar racers who have put together something that's a bit …

Forget fireworks and champagne-goggling subpar members of the opposite sex this New Year's. Instead, why not spend it bombing across Europe and North Africa in the Paris-Dakar Rally? The race, which begins New Year's Eve and continues through January 15th starts in Lisbon, Portugal this year for the first time. Also…