The Dakar Rally or simply "The Dakar", formerly known as the "Paris–Dakar Rally", is an annual rally raid organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation. Most events since the inception in 1978 were staged from Paris, France, to Dakar, Senegal. Security threats in Mauritania led to the cancellation of the 2008 rally, and events from 2009 to 2019 were held in South America. Since 2020, the rally has been held in Saudi Arabia. The event is open to amateur and professional entries, professionals typically making up about eighty percent of the participants.
Rallying is a wide-ranging form of motorsport with various competitive motoring elements such as speed tests, navigation tests, or the ability to reach waypoints or a destination at a prescribed time or average speed. Rallies may be short in the form of trials at a single venue, or several thousand miles long in an extreme endurance rally.
Petter Solberg is a Norwegian former professional rally and rallycross driver.
The Monte Carlo Rally or Rallye Monte-Carlo is a rallying event organized each year by the Automobile Club de Monaco. From its inception in 1911 by Prince Albert I, the rally was intended to demonstrate improvements and innovations in automobiles, and promote Monaco as a tourist resort on the Mediterranean shore. Before the format changed in 1997, the event was a “concentration rally” in which competitors would set off from various starting points around Europe and drive to Monaco, where the rally would continue to a set of special stages. The rally now takes place along the French Riviera in Monaco and southeast France.
The World Rally Championship is an international rallying series owned and governed by the FIA. Inaugurated in 1973, it is the second oldest of the FIA's world championships after Formula One. Each season lasts one calendar year, and separate championship titles are awarded to drivers, co-drivers and manufacturers. There are also two support championships, WRC2 and WRC3, which are contested on the same events and stages as the WRC, but with progressively lower maximum performance and running costs of the cars permitted. Junior WRC is also contested on five events of the World Rally Championship calendar.
Wales Rally GB was the most recent iteration of the United Kingdom's premier international motor rally, which ran under various names since the first event held in 1932. It was consistently a round of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) calendar from the inaugural 1973 season until the rally's final running in 2019, and was also frequently included in the British Rally Championship.
Juha Matti Pellervo Kankkunen is a Finnish former rally driver. His factory team career in the World Rally Championship lasted from 1983 to 2002. He won 23 world rallies and four drivers' world championship titles, which were both once records in the series. Both Sébastien Loeb and Sébastien Ogier have since collected more world titles, but no driver was able to repeat Kankkunen's feat of becoming a world champion with three different manufacturers until Ogier matched this achievement in 2020.
Ari Pieti Uolevi Vatanen is a Finnish rally driver turned politician and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1999 to 2009. He won the World Rally Championship drivers' title in 1981 and the Paris Dakar Rally four times. In addition, he won the 1997 FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Rallies.
Autocross is a form of motorsport in which competitors are timed to complete a short course using automobiles on a dirt or grass surface, excepting where sealed surfaces are used in United States. Rules vary according to the governing or sanctioning body, such as the length of the course, the amount of permitted attempts, or whether competitors start the course individually at intervals or at the same time as others. In this latter form, Autocross differs from other forms of motor racing by using a system of heats or alternative timing methods for the classification rather than racing for position and declaring the first across the finish line as the winner.
Marcus Ulf Johan "Bosse" Grönholm is a Finnish former rally and rallycross driver, being part of a family of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland lineage. His son, Niclas Grönholm, is an upcoming FIA World Rallycross Championship driver. Grönholm's nicknames are either "Bosse" or "Magic Marcus". Grönholm is one of the most successful WRC drivers of all time, ranking third in rally wins (30), and winning two championships, in 2000 and 2002. After Peugeot withdrew from the World Rally Championship, Grönholm moved to Ford for the 2006 season and placed second in the drivers' world championship, losing out to Sébastien Loeb by one point. The next year he again placed second, four points behind Loeb. He and his co-driver Timo Rautiainen retired from rallying after the 2007 season but returned to the championship in 2009 driving a private Subaru for a short period of time, and in the 2019 World Rally Championship where he competed in a Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT-maintained Toyota Yaris under the GRX Team banner.
Rallycross is a form of sprint style motorsport, held on a closed mixed-surface racing circuit, with modified production or specially built touring cars. It is mainly popular in the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Great Britain. An inexpensive, entry level type of rallycross is the Swedish folkrace or its Norwegian counterpart, the so-called bilcross. The folkrace is most popular in Finland where it was founded back in the late 1960s. In Europe, rallycross can also refer to racing 1:8 scale off-road radio-controlled buggies.
The ADAC Rallye Deutschland is a rally event held in Germany. The event was first held in 1982 and originally hosted by e.g. Frankfurt, Mainz and Koblenz. In 2000, the rally was relocated to the region around Trier. Previously part of the European and German championships, the event was in the World Rally Championship calendar from the 2002 season to 2020 season. The 2020 event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robert Józef Kubica is a Polish racing and rally driver, competing for AF Corse in the 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship and for AO by TF in the 2024 European Le Mans Series. He previously competed for Team WRT where he won the 2023 FIA World Endurance Championship in the LMP2 class. He was the first and, as of 2024, only Polish racing driver to compete and win a race in Formula One.
The Budapest-Bamako or Great African Run is a charity car race in Europe and Africa, and the largest amateur rally in the world. It is a low-budget version of the Dakar Rally, and goes from Budapest, Hungary to Bamako, Mali through the Sahara. It passes through Hungary, Austria or Slovenia, Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Mauritania and Mali. The Budapest-Bamako was inspired by the Paris-Dakar Rally. There are few entry restrictions: as long as a vehicle is street legal, it can join the event.
The London to Brighton Veteran Car Run is the world's longest-running motoring event, held on a course between London and Brighton, England. To qualify, participating cars must have been built before 1905. It is also the world's largest gathering of veteran cars. The first edition, "The Emancipation Run" in 1896, celebrated the recently passed Locomotives on Highways Act 1896, which liberalised motor vehicle laws in the United Kingdom.
Travis Alan Pastrana is an American professional motorsports competitor and stunt performer who has won championships and X Games gold medals in several disciplines, including supercross, motocross, freestyle motocross, rally racing and offshore powerboat racing. He runs a show called Nitro Circus and the rallycross racing series Nitrocross.
Milka Duno is a former Venezuelan race car driver who competed in the IndyCar Series and ARCA Racing Series. She is best known for holding the record of highest finish for a female driver in the 24 Hours of Daytona. She entered the NASCAR Nationwide Series in 2014.
The Citroën Total World Rally Team was the Citroën factory backed entry into the World Rally Championship (WRC), run by Citroën Racing.
Kris Meeke is a British professional rally driver from Northern Ireland, best known for competing in the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC). He was the 2009 Intercontinental Rally Challenge champion. His co-driver is Seb Marshall . He began his career as a Computer Aided Designer with M-Sport, at the headquarters of the Ford World Rally Team, before moving on to competing in the Peugeot Super 106 Cup in 2001.
The following is a glossary of terminology used in motorsport, along with explanations of their meanings.
