POWER UP!

Audi's monster Dakar desert racer combines electric motors from Formula E with a detuned DTM petrol engine in one extraordinary package. Hold on tight as we put it through its paces

-  JETHRO BOVINGDON

IT MUST BE SOME TIME IN THE LATE '80s. The Ride of the Valkyries is ringing out of a cathode-ray TV pushed into the corner of the living room at my parents' house. I'm pretty much mesmerised as cars float over the desert floor, motorbikes elegantly glide from one ascent to the next and, as the music reaches its zenith, a huge racing truck flies from atop a colossal dune in slow motion, sand cascading from the treads of its tyres. It's like the world has been whipped from beneath its wheels and a wide-eyed young Bovingdon feels like the rug has been pulled from everything I know, too. What is this magnificence unfolding in front of me?

The footage is a promo piece on Eurosport for the upcoming Paris-Dakar and it is balletic, exotic, and deeply enthralling. Over the next couple of weeks I'm obsessed: consuming the daily highlights packages voraciously, reeling at the thought of a 10,000-kilometre race, falling under the spell of the giant support trucks that race alongside the cars and seem just about as fast. There are tragic deaths, tales of bandits, crashes that leave the landscape littered with debris, and drivers and riders who look broken, elated, dazed, and, mostly, out of their minds. The Paris-Dakar seemed like a fable that Marco Polo would dream up. Rally Raid. Even the name had a fairytale quality to it.

My love affair with the idea of the Dakar has never ended but, strangely, I've never really followed it closely since. Instead, I've wanted to hold on to the sense of mystery and myth that shrouds this epic, other-worldly race. Even now, in a time when access to coverage is so much easier, I tend to look on from afar at the Dakar. Like it exists in another universe. Untouchable, unknowable.