New changes in Dakar 2023

Although this is the fourth time that Dakar Rally has been contested in Saudi Arabia, the adjustment of the route and rules of the competition every year will always bring new highlights to the competition. Today, we will make some interpretations of the new changes in all aspects of the 2023 Dakar Rally.

Longer route
On December 1, 2022, the Dakar Games announced the competition route for 2023 for the first time, and the competition will still be held in Saudi Arabia. The winding route starts from the Jeddah base camp on the Red Sea coast, and after two weeks of arduous trek, reaches the end point of the Persian Gulf coast, Dammam. The route crosses the whole country from the west coast of Saudi Arabia to the east coast, with a total length of more than 8500 kilometers, including 4704 kilometers of timekeeping section, and the rest are liaison sections. This also marks that Dakar has become the longest route since 2014. In addition, 70% of the race sections this year are new routes that have not been run in previous years, effectively reducing the experience gap between new and old Dakar players. This is relatively advantageous for the team that competes for the first time like Kaiyue.


More time
The Dakar Rally in 2023 will have 14 official stages and one opening qualifying race, a total of 15 race days, two more than the previous races. Although it was only two more days, the 12-day race in the past year has pushed the biker and the bike to the brink of collapse. In the past, there were many mechanical failures and even engine cylinder bursts in the middle of the road. Even in teams with strong backing such as KTM and Honda, it is not uncommon. This is also why Dakar is known as the world's toughest rally. The additional 2 race days this year may make the teams and bikers adopt different competition strategies than before. Although the rules of Dakar allow the engine to be replaced in the middle of the race, a very severe penalty will be imposed. In order to ensure that the vehicle can run for 14 days this year, what kind of coping strategies will be offered by the participating teams is also one of the new highlights of this year. The Kaiyue team encountered such a "hard stubble" in its first competition, which obviously posed a great challenge to the biker's will quality, the durability of the bike and the support ability of the backup team.


The guidebook is divided into AB volumes
In some stages of this year's race, the new method of randomly distributing AB volumes of guidebooks will be adopted, that is, between the same starting point and end point, there will be two AB routes with the same difficulty but different routes, which will be randomly distributed to bikers before the race every day. Therefore, the biker cannot judge whether the biker in front is on the same route as himself, nor can he adopt the following strategy. This rule change makes every bikerface the same navigation problem. There is no way to take advantage of it by running. It is relatively more fair.


The leading biker has time to compensate
The starting sequence of each stage is determined according to the completion sequence of the previous stage, that is, the leading biker of the previous stage will take the lead in the next stage. The first motorcyclist to start is the most "unlucky", because he will be the first pioneer to start in all groups. He will face an open environment without any ruts and any other racing bikes. It will take him a lot of time to find the route alone, and often the lead biker will get lost. Therefore, in previous years, there will be a "Yo-yo effect" in which the results will rise and fall sharply, that is, the leading bikers in the previous stage will have a significant decline in the results in the next stage due to excessive consumption of the lead. Therefore, in some cases, the leading bikers will use the strategy of deliberately delaying time to avoid winning the first place in the stage. In order to avoid this negative situation, the 2023 Dakar will give the leading bikers some time compensation.


Daily settlement award
Although the top players in the result list are all the famous bikers of the factory team, it is impossible for such a big race to rely on more than a dozen of the factory team bikers. As in previous years, most of the 124 motorcycle bikers participating in this year are amateur bikers who come to realize their dreams. In order to attract more amateur bikers to join Dakar, this year, the competition will give cash rewards to the bikers who lead the amateur team every day. Under the heavy reward, will there be brave men who have created amazing black horse achievements? We will wait and see.