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[56]Automotive History, [57]Motorsports

Remembering the triumph and tragedy of the 1986 Paris-Dakar rally

[58]Andrew Newton
20 January 2021
Porsche's 959 was victorious in the 1986 Paris-Dakar Rally. Porsche

The 2021 Dakar Rally wrapped up on January 15, after 14 days and 7646
kilometers (4751 miles) traversing the unforgiving desert terrain of
Saudi Arabia. Fifty-five-year-old Frenchman Stephane Peterhansel, the
most successful competitor in Dakar's history, won his eighth title in
the car class (he also won the bike class six times in the 1990s), and
Argentinian Kevin Benavides became the first South American rider to
win the two-wheeled category. Russian Dmitry Sotnikov won the truck
class. French rider Pierre Cherpin died from injuries sustained on the
event's 7th stage.

This was only the Dakar's second running on the Arabian peninsula, but
it was the 43rd iteration of the world-famous rally. The raid has gone
through three continents over the decades, but its reputation for
toughness and danger has never wavered. This year also marks 35 years
since the 1986 running of the event, a year which gave rise to some of
the greatest triumphs (and certainly some of the greatest tragedies) in
the history of the Dakar Rally.
MCH Photography

By 1986, the Paris-Dakar (as it was known then) was in its eighth year,
and the competition's amateur spirit was very much intact. But if an
event as dangerous as Paris-Dakar ever had any wide-eyed naiveté, '86
was the year reality set in.

Massive, professional factory teams had arrived in full force in all
three classes (motorcycles, cars, and trucks), including three
experimental supercars from Porsche. Sports car fans mainly remember
the 1986 Paris-Dakar for those Porsches and their sparkling performance
in the desert that year, but the event was also marred by rough weather
and an especially treacherous route, which contributed to 1986 being
one of the deadliest years in the event's history. Six people lost
their lives, including two participants, a famous singer, and the
event's founder and figurehead. Let's take a look back at what the
official Dakar website calls "The Black Year."

Paris-Dakar's origins

RALLYE PARIS DAKAR THIERRY SABINE organizer Thierry Sabine, January,
1986. Daniel Janin & Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

Back in 1977, while riding a Yamaha XT 500 in the Abidjan-Nice Rally, a
wealthy French motorcycle racer named Thierry Sabine got lost in the
Libyan desert. Forced to wait for rescue, he was captivated by the
landscape and became inspired to organize a rally raid (essentially a
long-distance, multi-day endurance rally) through the terrain. He
wanted "to go beyond my limits and to take other people beyond theirs,"
and in turn introduce the world at large to the natural beauty of the
Sahara.

Sabine made it happen the very next year, and the first Paris-Dakar
began the day after Christmas in 1978. The official start was at the
Esplanade of the Trocadero, near the Eiffel Tower, and the race
finished in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. The thousands of miles of
punishing rocks, boulders, dunes, rivers, and other dangers in between
took several weeks to conquer.
1980 paris dakar rally start eiffel tower backdrop Competitors gather
at Trocadero esplanade in front of the Eiffel tower in Paris, 1980.
Georges Bendrihem/AFP via Getty Images

Of the 182 participants who set out from Paris, 108 failed to finish,
and the event's first fatality took place in Niger. The big winner was
21-year-old Cyril Neveu, of France, who won the event riding a Yamaha
bike, while a Range Rover took fourth overall and first in the car
class. A few dozen more adventurers found themselves tempted by the
second running in 1980, and Paris-Dakar's official motto became "A
challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind." It
quickly gained a reputation as one of the most grueling, most
controversial, and most violent events of its kind anywhere in the
world.

For the first few years, however, the Paris-Dakar entry lists were
mostly full of French amateurs in lightly modified road vehicles. Many
were in it just as much for the adventure as they were for the
competition. One group tried to tackle the first rally in a 1920s
Renault KZ, and a quartet of riders gave the 1980 event a go on their
Vespas.

It wasn't until 1982 that Paris-Dakar achieved mainstream international
buzz, but hardly for rosy reasons. During the rally, in the desert near
the Algeria-Mali border, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's son Mark
went missing. Serving as navigator in a rally-prepped Peugeot 504 that
he called "the very worst car to do the trip in," he made it most of
the way through Algeria before the rear axle broke and stranded him,
the driver, and the on-board mechanic. The organizers went looking for
them--albeit in the wrong place--and newspapers ran headlines like
"Maggie's Son Lost in Sahara" and "Fears Grow For Lost Mark" as the
trio waited six days, drinking water from the Peugeot's radiator to
keep from dehydrating, until their rescue.
Thierry Sabine and Alain-Dominique Perrin Alain-Dominique Perrin (CEO
of Cartier) and Thierry Sabine, present a map for the 8th Paris-Dakar
rally, Place Vendome, 1985. Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

From there, Paris-Dakar got a little more serious, attracting more
determined competition beyond just amateur thrill seekers and
eccentrics. The notoriety of the rally attracted more money, more
corporate sponsorship, and OEM involvement. Big-budget factory teams
were keen to score unforgettable PR value, and engineers wanted to put
new technology to the toughest of real-world tests. Even stars of
Formula 1 and sports car racing wanted a crack at the rally's rigorous
challenges.

All the while, danger persisted. The 1983 rally entered the Ténéré
section of the south central Sahara for the first time, and 40
competitors (still navigating by compass and paper maps) got separated
and became lost during a massive sandstorm. Jacky Ickx won the event in
a heavily modified, [59]Texaco-sponsored Mercedes G-Wagen.
mercedes g wagen texaco dakar ickx G-Class at the '83 Dakar.
Mercedes-BenzParis Dakar 1984 Porsche 911 Carrera 3-2 Type 953 action
Porsche's 953, 1984. Porsche

Porsche arrived as one of the first factory teams in 1984, enlisting
Ickx to lead the effort sponsored by Rothmans tobacco. Despite
garnering considerable skepticism for fielding a small sports car to an
infamous vehicle-breaking trial like the Dakar, Porsche's 953
(essentially a 911 with upgraded suspension and manually-controlled
four-wheel drive system) silenced the naysayers by finishing first,
sixth, and 26th. The influence of these rally Porsches [60]can still be
felt today.

The stage for '86

A longer, more difficult route set the stage for the 1986 Paris-Dakar
rally. Having worked long hours through the holidays prepping,
checking, and figuring out logistics (international travel and shipping
were a lot more complicated in those pre-E.U.days), the competitors
officially set off on New Year's Day from the Place d'Armes in
Versailles.
Paris Dakar Rally motorbikes Philippe Le Tellier / Getty Images

Ahead of them were 15,000 km (over 9300 miles), almost none of it on
paved roads and over half of it on special stages winding through seven
countries and along several war-torn borders. In the Sahara,
competitors could expect temperatures of up to 120 degrees F in the
daytime, but below freezing at night. Traveling with them and
accessible at night was a mobile base camp, or bivouac, offering food,
few hours of rest, and time for vehicle repair and maintenance. Each
day would start with a briefing with up-to-date information on the
route for that day, but both the briefing and the road book provided
were exclusively in French. The organizers planned for the whole thing
to take about three weeks, with competitors divided up into three
classes: bikes, cars, and large purpose-built trucks. (The parts-laden
support trucks for the bigger-budget teams could technically compete in
the truck class, too.)

For 1986, the rally also announced it would donate water pumps to some
of the villages along the route. Was this purely an act of goodwill?
Maybe, but it was more likely a calculated hedge against bad publicity;
the year before, the rally-goers bought up all the fuel in Timbuktu,
and one charity reported a three-week shortage after it left.
Paris Dakar Rally Prep 1986 French singer Daniel Balavoine (2nd L)
poses along with other people during the setting up of a sun powered
water pump, 1986. Daniel Janin & Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

According to the official tally, 486 competitors lined up at the start
in Versailles, divided between 131 bikes, 282 cars, and 73 trucks. Star
of the bike class and going for his third consecutive Dakar win was
Belgian rider Gaston Rahier on a Marlboro-liveried BMW motorcycle, who
said his "first opposition is the desert." Rahier had plenty of other
opposition as well. Honda developed a new NXR750 for the 1986 Dakar
with a new 779-cc, 70-hp overhead cam V-twin, and the favorite on the
Rothmans-sponsored Honda was 1979, '80, and '82 race winner Cyril
Neveu. Hubert Auriol, the 1981 and 1983 winner, was also a favorite,
riding for Cagiva.

The bike class was the most affordable to enter and thus hosted many
amateurs paying their own way and performing their own repairs. For
them, just finishing the rally would be victory enough. The car class,
meanwhile, demonstrated how the desert can truly level the playing
field. Nowhere else would you find [61]Toyota Land Cruisers and Porsche
supercars all vying for the same prize. Among the entrants was a group
of German Opel Kadett 4x4s, Russian Ladas, and British Range Rovers.
Mitsubishi, winners in 1985, arrived with even faster versions of its
proven Pajero SUV. Among the privateers, and also running a Pajero, was
Prince Albert of Monaco, having his second go at the event after
failing to finish the year before. (A few days later, he would lose
some of his royal luggage after the door of his Mitsubishi flew open
mid-race.)

Porsche, winners of the 1984 event, were back with a vengeance after
bad luck and a few tactical errors took all three of its cars out of
the 1985 rally. The weapon of choice for '86 was the [62]959, the
full-fledged concept of a four-wheel drive competition supercar that
had been carefully developed over the previous two years. With
water-cooled heads and two turbochargers, it developed nearly twice the
power of the winning 1984 car but was barely any heavier. Suspension
included double wishbones and twin dampers up front, with double
wishbones in the rear as well. There were more advanced touches, such
as knobs on the dash to control ignition timing (the fuel in Africa
could be as low as 75 octane), but also simple solutions: pieces of
wood on which to set the jacks prevented the car from sinking into the
Sahara sand.
porsche museum 280 g mercedes 928 engine dakar The Rothmans-liveried,
928-powered Mercedes G-Class from the '85 event. Porsche Museum

The Rothmans Porsche team, fresh from a win in the 1985 Pharaoh's
Rally, fielded three 959s and brought over 20 people, two large MAN
support trucks, a DC-3 chase plane, and a "fast service vehicle" in the
form of a Mercedes G-Wagen packed with a [63]Porsche 928S 4.7-liter
V-8. Porsche even consulted a doctor to concoct special drinks with
vitamins and electrolytes to keep the drivers, co-drivers, and
mechanics in peak condition.

Piloting 959 #186 was 1984 winner René Metge, a desert specialist known
for chain smoking Gauloises cigarettes, along with his co-driver
Dominique Lemoyne. Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur were in another,
while Porsche engineer Roland Kussmaul and co-driver Wolf-Hendrik Unger
were in the other.

In the truck class were several purpose-built rigs, as well as the
support trucks for the larger car and bike teams. But even some of the
race trucks had their own support trucks, another sign of how this
whole crazy enterprise had scaled up in the eight years since it began.
Among the main competitors were some Spanish Pegasos and Czech Tatras,
while the Minardi team--fresh from a disastrous debut season in Formula
1--made things harder for itself by braving Dakar in a CVS (Costruzione
Veicoli Speciali) truck. Dutchman Jan De Rooy's purpose-built DAF was
the favorite; with two twin-turbo engines making 500 hp each, it
boasted a 200-kmh (124-mph) top speed and promised to be as fast as the
cars on some of the open stages.

Merciless fury

Paris Dakar Rally Philippe Le Tellier/Getty Images

On January 1, the "Prologue" started from Versailles. This first stage
through the relatively tame terrain of Europe determined the starting
order when the rally reached the rough-and-tumble in Africa. As the
competitors made their way from Versailles to the French port city of
Sète, some 300,000 spectators turned out to watch the parade of loud
bikes, cars, and trucks making their way across the country. The
prologue was supposed to be the easy part, but things got off to a
rough start. Weather conspired against the nearly 500 vehicles, and a
snowstorm blasting through France made things particularly hard on the
bikes, causing several wipeouts. Then, in a road accident in between
stages, the 1986 Paris-Dakar Rally saw the first of several fatalities
when Japanese rider Yasuo Keneko got hit by an automobile. Some reports
cited a drunk driver as the cause of the incident.

With the starting order set following the completion of the Prologue,
the rally departed on Algerian ferries across the Mediterranean with
the vehicles, participants, organizers, fuel, and supplies. The next
five stages through Algeria greeted competitors with rocks and boulders
known for breaking axles and bursting tires. The retirements began to
mount, as four-time Le Mans winner Henri Pescarolo's Range Rover caught
fire just 15 km into one of the first Algerian stages and burned to the
ground.

The Rothmans Porsche team's all-out assault wasn't off to an ideal
start, either. Having suffered problems in these stages the year prior,
Porsche was purposely taking things easy, waiting for the more open
desert in the southern Sahara to press their speed advantage. Even so,
the team lost both the 928-powered G-Wagen support vehicle and one of
the large MAN support trucks, so Roland Kussmaul's 959 was loaded up
with spares and relegated to the role of backup car. A spare
intercooler and some radiators were strapped to the spoiler of his 959.

Algeria was hard on everybody, and the danger wasn't just limited to
the competitors. During the sixth stage, a loop through the Hoggar
mountains that started and ended in the town of Tamanrassett, a
helicopter filming the rally crashed right next to the route. One of
its rotors had to be moved to allow the competitors to pass. Aside from
that obstacle, the trucks in particular struggled to maneuver through
the tall, steep mountain passes. Several tipped over while rounding
tight bends.

For the seventh stage, the route went 828 km (514 miles) south from
Tamanrassett in Algeria to Agadez in Niger. There were still rocks to
hit, but the landscape mercifully opened up a bit. In the car class,
which had the only night stage of the rally along this part of the
route, the Porsches of Metge and Ickx were able to open up a convincing
lead over the Mitsubishis that had been the early leaders. In the bike
class, Gaston Rahier suffered a crash, cracking six ribs and breaking
his collarbone, but he kept riding in hopes of a third win. He relied
on acupuncture treatments at the end of each day's ride.

Once the rally entered the Ténéré, the landscape opened up to wide open
sand, deep dunes, the horizon, and little else. The only real points of
reference were a metal tree sculpture and a downed aircraft--a press
plane that happened to crash during the 1985 Paris-Dakar Rally while
going in for a close-up. It was both a landmark and a warning.
Paris Dakar Rally Philippe Le Tellier/Getty Images

Porsche driver Roland Kussmaul compared the varying terrain to surfing,
because the Ténéré has "small up and downs, and with the car you go up
and fly down, up and fly down. And it was easy, it was soft, it was not
harsh ... So you sit in the car and you are smiling. But then, when you
hit a step in the sand, it steps down and the smiling is gone."

The stages winding to Dirkou and Zinder (both in Niger) saw steeper,
more dangerous grades. There may not have been boulders, tree stumps,
or livestock to hit, but the combination of deep sand and steep dunes
with rapidly moving vehicles proved even more dangerous than the rocky
and mountainous parts of the desert. Flying through the sand on his
Cagiva, Hubert Auriol launched into the air on his bike over one dune
and wiped out. While uninjured, he lost precious time restarting his
motorcycle. After nosediving over a ridge, both codrivers in one of the
Czech Liaz trucks suffered internal injuries, while a Range-Rover Proto
flipped over a dune and crushed the roof. Jan De Rooy's DAF became so
bogged down in the sand that it had to be dug out with shovels. The
Minardi team's CVS truck, meanwhile, experienced an electrical fire and
completely torched itself. The truck had been in second place.

Then came the sandstorms. The air fleet that normally follows the rally
was grounded. With mounting injuries among the competitors, the
organizers commandeered a Hercules aircraft to use as a mobile
hospital. Veronique Anquetil, a 26-year-old Yamaha rider, was one of
several to crash in the dunes before being carried unconscious to the
bivouac at the end of the stage. Jean Michel Baron, one of the
top-running Rothmans Honda riders, was even worse off, sustaining
serious head injuries in the dunes. Doctors operated in a makeshift
hospital area at the edge of an airstrip, but both Baron and Anquetil
were ultimately airlifted to hospital in Paris. Baron fell into a coma,
from which he never awoke. He passed in 2010.
Thierry Sabine helicopter crash The wreckage of Sabine's fatal
helicopter crash. STR/AFP via Getty Images

After 14 days, the rally reached the two-thirds mark. Fewer than
one-third of those who set off were still in the running. Just 99 cars,
44 bikes, and 37 trucks reached the Niger River. On the 12th stage of
the rally, from Niger's capital of Niamey to Gourma, 1985 winner
Patrick Zaniroli, in a Mitsubishi, got lost and received a 10-hour
penalty for not finishing the allotted distance in time. Meanwhile, on
the evening of January 14, amid worsening sandstorms and as the rest of
the aircraft associated with the rally remained grounded, event
organizer and figurehead Thierry Sabine took off in his white
helicopter, nicknamed Sierra, on another mercy mission looking for lost
competitors. Sabine was frequently dressed in a white jumpsuit and he
wore his blonde hair long. He also kept a beard, and all this naturally
that led to the nickname "Jesus" as lost Dakar competitors could
frequently count on Sabine coming to their rescue.

After January 14, 1986, they couldn't count on him anymore. Near
Gourma-Rharous in Mali, Sabine's helicopter crashed in the midst of the
sandstorms, killing everyone on board. Sabine, 36 years old and
engaged, was on board with famous French singer Daniel Balavoine,
25-year-old reporter Nathalie Odent, journalist Jean-Paul Le Fur, and
pilot Francois-Xavier Bagnoud--a cousin of Monaco's Prince Albert. Some
wondered if the rally would be stopped then and there, but the
organizers decided to continue on, noting that it was what Sabine would
have wanted. They did, however, cancel the January 15 stages. The
competitors who were left made a silent convoy to Bamako in Mali.
Sabine's deputy, Patrick Verdoy, took the reins for the remaining
stages.

Upon arriving to Labe in Guinea, the organizers announced an extra rest
day (usually there is only one rest day for the entire event). Several
members of the Rothmans Porsche team had their passports stolen before
leaving Labe, but the 959s had a comfortable lead in the car class and
filled the top three places. But as the landscape changed to trees,
rocks, streams, and villages, their outright speed and power advantage
diminished. Jan de Rooy's twin-engine DAF truck, which had been
seriously fast so far, broke its front axle and retired as the rally
moved to Mauritania. Meanwhile, Gaston Rahier on the Marlboro BMW
suffered more bad luck, with two flat tires and a gearbox problem
delaying him enough to earn a 10-hour penalty and dash his hopes for a
win. With nothing left to lose, he threw caution to the wind and pushed
hard on the last three stages, finishing first in all three just to
prove a point.
1985 Porsche 959 Paris-Dakar interior
RM Sotheby's/Robin Adams
1985 Porsche 959 Paris-Dakar engine
RM Sotheby's/Robin Adams
1985 Porsche 959 Paris-Dakar rear three-quarter
RM Sotheby's/Robin Adams

As at the dunes of the Ténéré, the crossing at the Senegal River proved
to be a major impediment that would unexpectedly shuffle the standings.
An abnormal amount of rain for that time of year brought lots of mud,
too much for the top three contenders in the truck class to manage.
Suddenly, the Mercedes Unimog support truck for the Honda of Italy
motorcycle team found itself in the lead.

Meanwhile, in the car class, the Porsche team was witnessing an
emerging threat to its once-comfortable lead. Both Metge and Ickx's
959s got stuck in the mud. Roland Kussmaul, in the third 959, then
watched carefully how one of the motorcycles crossed the river, and he
successfully followed the same path before turning around to help the
other two Porsches. Using some spare cable, he was able to pull both
other cars to safety; in the process, however, his own car sunk down to
the hubs in thick, gloppy earth. Metge and Ickx wanted to stick around
to help, but Kussmaul honorably sent them on their way to take the
class win. After digging himself out and making his way to the bivouac,
he was too exhausted to speak and had to see a doctor. Had he gone on
ahead instead of helping his teammates, he might have won the entire
1986 Paris-Dakar Rally.

Reaching Dakar

Motorcyclists Dakar rally beach last leg start Motorcyclists attack the
start of the last leg of the Paris-Dakar on the beach of Dakar, January
21st, 2001. Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty Images

Exactly three weeks after departing Versailles, just 100 competitors
(fewer than 21 percent) reached Dakar. There were just 29 bikes and a
handful of trucks at the finish along the beaches of Lac Rose, a salt
lake known for its pinkish water.

The last stage was a short 60-km dash down the beaches. After three
weeks' worth of racing, the finishing order was typically set by this
point, and the final side-by-side sprint on the sand was more a
procession for the finishers than a serious competition stage. Yet even
here danger lurked, as both water and wet sand posed tangible threats.
Cagiva rider Giampaolo Marinoni crashed and died just 40 km from the
finish.

Understandably, celebrations were subdued out of respect for the
fallen, but the finishers had all accomplished something remarkable.
Cyril Neveu on the Rothmans Honda took his fourth bike win (he won
again in 1987). The Rothmans Porsche team took first and second, while
Roland Kussmaul came home sixth despite his sacrifice (which included
carrying piles of parts for the other two cars). The 959 had proved its
worth, and a production version followed that would be the fastest and
most technologically advanced road car at introduction. In the truck
class, the surprise winners were Giacomo Vismara and Giulio Minelli in
the Mercedes support truck for the Honda of Italy bike team.

Endurance rally

2021 Dakar Saudi Arabia Dakar Rally, Saudi Arabia, 2021. Antonin
Vincent/DPPI

After Sabine's death in the 1986 event, many wondered if the rally
could or would continue on at all, but it persisted. Porsche, having
achieved its goal, didn't come back for 1987 but another big factory
team arrived to take its place. Peugeot, stuck with obsolete 205 rally
cars after the FIA banned Group B rallying in Europe the year before,
brought them to Africa and won the car class with 1981 WRC Champion Ari
Vatanen at the wheel. Cyril Neveu won yet again in '87, after Hubert
Auriol broke both his ankles in a fall. Jan de Rooy came back to win
the truck class.

Criticism of the event was gathering steam. A 1988 New York Times
article quoted one French group campaigning to end the Paris-Dakar,
criticizing it for using "Africa's poorest corner as a playground for
the rich." A company called ASO bought the rally in the early 1990s,
but despite more corporatization and sponsorships its fearsome
reputation carried on. A journalist once quipped that Paris-Dakar was
"like war without the bullets," but sometimes there were actual
bullets. In 1991 a support truck driver for the Citroën team was shot
dead, and the Malian army escorted the rally through the rest of the
country. In 1996 another support truck driver ranover an old Moroccan
army land mine and died. But the final nail in the rally's coffin, at
least in its original form, came years later. When terrorist groups in
Mauritania threatened the 2008 rally directly after the slaying of four
French tourists there on Christmas Eve 2007, the event was shuttered
and moved to South America for 2009 with the "Dakar Rally" name intact.
It's unclear if the Dakar Rally will ever go back to Africa, but the
event appears to have found a successful home in Saudi Arabia after the
last two years in that country.

There are endless stories that come out of the Dakar Rally in any given
year, but 1986 was the most eventful iteration of an already
notoriously crazy event. No doubt the competition will continue to be a
source of adventure for as long as it endures.

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