It’s been an eventful few years for Daniel Pycock. The British audiovisual producer and CEO, now living in Madrid, has turned his life around with a rigorous physical training regimen while going on several adventures alongside his best friend and business partner Fran Gómez.
In January, their escapades took them to Saudi Arabia and the Dakar Classic. The duo took part in a 1993 Mitsubishi Pajero with one simple goal: finish the race. While they ended up at the bottom of the leaderboard, classified 64th among cars and 84th overall, their “cursed” Pajero was one of the 91 finishers in a mission ultimately achieved.
131 Off-Road sat down with Pycock to discuss the road to Dakar, the Classic, and his other endeavors.
Pandas and the Pajero
“It’s a really interesting story, because I don’t think it was really planned at all.”
– Daniel Pycock
Pycock’s journey to the Dakar Classic began somewhat by chance. In 2018, he was scrolling Instagram when he came across an advertisement for the Panda Raid, an amateur rally across the Moroccan desert in Fiat Pandas. He brought up the idea with Gómez with the pitch: “Hey, I think we should buy a Panda and sign up for this shit because we have no idea what this is about, but it looks like fun.”
They got a Panda and an entry from someone who couldn’t make the trip due to an illness that required an operation. In a field of 500 with zero rally experience, they finished 42nd overall. This made Pycock think that maybe “we’re not that bad at this shit, so we decided to pursue it.” He and Gómez did two more Panda Raids after that before figuring it was “time to switch to a bigger car” and look beyond that.
“We were already thinking of the horizon to do a Dakar Classic, but obviously, we needed to prepare before that and we needed more experience than just the Panda races,” he explained.
While searching for a car, Pycock specifically wanted a Pajero. The Mitsubishi machine is an icon of the Paris–Dakar era, with the Evolution variant claiming the outright victory 12 times between 1985 and the final African Dakar in 2007. It’s such a popular vehicle that Mitsubishi Motors revived the line for the 2027 model year.
“Since childhood, I remember watching Dakar and I was very obsessed about the Mitsubishi Pajero,” reminisced Pycock. “It was my favorite and I said if we’re going to do this, we have to do it with a classic Pajero. We set out to find a car that we could work with.”
On the other hand, finding a suitable model wasn’t as easy as it sounded. They went to the Czech Republic, where a car was offered alongside the crew, but it didn’t work out. Pycock eventually spoke with someone willing to sell him a 1993 Pajero for the “really cheap price” of about €15,000. It had raced Dakar before, was “pretty much prepared”, and simply needed a “bigger fuel tank and some reinforcement in the clutch and the suspensions”.
All things considered, it was perfect. Well, except for one big catch.
“A Spanish guy from the south of Spain started talking to me about this Mitsubishi Pajero but that it was cursed,” Pycock explained. “It had been to the Dakar Classic twice, and both times it wasn’t able to complete the race. The first time, it only did like 500 meters and they burnt the engine.
“I said, ‘Well, yeah, I know, but what’s the story?’ They said, ‘Nobody wants the car because nobody wants to invest in it and take it all the way out to Saudi Arabia. There’s too much risk and everybody thinks the car is now cursed.” I said, ‘Ah, that sounds like a challenge for me.’”
With Pycock busy running his business VA361 Productions, he had a friend and local mechanic prep the car. The Barcelona-based Pedregà Team, who boasts experience at both the Classic and Rally, was entrusted with servicing.
“We started investigating into Dakar and we thought, ‘Well, if there are nights when you only have four or five hours, you have to choose between repairing the car yourself or sleeping,’” he commented. “We decided that having a support team would be a good idea because we like to sleep, then we reached out to a few different options. We ended up signing up with Pedregà because they’re from Barcelona.”
Of course, racing the Pajero isn’t exactly a Sunday drive. Even if you’re driving the 4×4 variant used in the Panda Raid, Pycock remarked “the Panda is a Panda. Eventually, you’ll get it to go anywhere with patience and time and finding the right route, you can get that damn car almost about anywhere. But the Pajero is a different story.”
His Pajero is a short-wheelbase model that comes with a three-liter V6 engine and the original gears from ’93. Once it was good to go, he and Gómez competed in events like RallyClassics Africa, where they finished ninth for Pre-1997 cars in 2025.
“It’s an all-terrain. It does really well everywhere, but in the dunes is a different story,” he opined. “You’ll see lots of people with the dunes struggling. The truth is, if you put the low gear into the Pajero and you go about it the right way, that damn thing will just start clipping. It won’t stop and it just keeps on climbing. It’s like a bloody tractor. That makes it a lot a lot of fun in the dunes.”
However, there was one issue which ate at Pycock about the car—the category it was in.
The Pajero was entered in the H2.B class; in layman’s terms, “H2” refers to a moderate average speed while “B” means vehicles built between 1986 and 1998. Since regularity rallies aren’t about setting the fastest time, the average speed of a given vehicle is used to categorize it alongside similar peers.
For safety reasons if they feel their car is too slow or too fast for what they signed up in, teams are allowed to ask for a group change after the Prologue. Four such cases happened at this year’s race: the Land Cruisers of Shammie Baridwan and Kim Matzen went from H2 to H1, Stéphane Debair’s Isuzu D-Max dropped down to H2 from H3 (intermediate average speed), and Lorenzo Traglio’s Nissan Pick-Up was deemed ineligible for H1 (high speed) so he was moved to H2.
“Our car could have been in H1 or H2 category. We probably should’ve chosen the slower category,” Pycock felt. “We did want a bit of a challenge and we didn’t want to feel like we were just going for a ride, but honestly, for the car and for what it’s capable of, you have to think that our car is just barely stock. Especially for the suspensions, the speeds that were expected at the category that we were in were almost pushing the car to the limit. I think if we would’ve chosen the lower category, we would’ve done a better classification because we would have been a lot better with times, but also maybe we would have been a little bit more bored.
“There’s also the fun aspect that needs to fit in there, especially when we’re not competing as professionals. We’re just competing to enjoy and live the experience. It was maybe not the right choice, but it was the choice we did and we enjoyed.”
The Dakar Classic
Upon arriving in Yanbu, Pycock was taken away by how large the first bivouac was. The moment he arrived, the first thought he had was, ‘Hoooooly god, this thing is a bloody city. This is Mad Max. This is incredible.’ The base camp can hold as many as three thousand people, and the fact that it moves with the race essentially makes it a mobile village—think Mad Max meets Howl’s Moving Castle.
From the tents where everyone stays to the haulers and trucks for logistics and team ops, and even the buildings for hospitality, food, and shopping, you’re forgiven if you get overwhelmed.
“The amount of people, the logistics involved, the amount of helicopters that were available, the sheer scale and size of the event itself was just like, wow,” he exclaimed. “It set me back completely. I expected a big event, but when I got there, the size, it had escaped me until that point. When I got there and saw the city in Yanbu, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is a beast.’
“If you’re a petrolhead and you like the cars, you have to go and live that once in a lifetime. It’s such an experience. The freedom of moving around if you do have free time, when you do have it, it’s great to be able to go and see the professionals and see the cars being repaired. You get to share with so many people from around the world. You have all nationalities of the world, everybody has a different story of why they’re there or how they got there. There’s so much sharing going on with that common interest of racing.
“Because you’re under strenuous circumstances, you’re sleep deprived, it’s hard, you build very strong relationships with the people that are supporting you there. I think it just becomes an incredible atmosphere. It’s something that’s definitely worth experiencing.”
Even for someone who raced in Morocco, his past rallies were a poor reference for the encampments and even the route of Saudi Arabia. He compared Morocco to a “tiny-scaled, miniature version of Saudi” both in terms of the moving cities between stages as well as the specials themselves.
“When we’re racing in Morocco, you wake up in the morning and your connection to the race start is maybe 20 kilometers on the road. But when we get to Saudi Arabia, there are some mornings that you have to do 280 kilometers before you actually start racing,” Pycock explained. “When you’re doing that in a 1993 Pajero, top speed on the road is 110, so it takes time and patience. What we do in Morocco, like RallyClassics Africa or Rallye du Maroc, you’re doing five or six days of racing and maybe five, six, eight hours.
“But Dakar is just a different beast. Two weeks nonstop, 18-hour days, the scale is incomparable. When you face a Dakar, you realize that you’re probably going to do more hours driving than all of the previous races combined. You reach there and then, all of a sudden, that dawns on you and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what have we done?’”
Naturally, the top drivers approach Dakar with the goal of adding a Bedouin to their trophy case. For everyone else, however, their goals tend to vary. New manufacturers like Ducati envision Dakar as a way to test their vehicles’ capabilities, brands who’ve enjoyed success domestically such as JJ Sport want to see if they can impress at the global level, and those like Spanish marques Santana Motor and Ebro picture the race as their way to make an introduction.
For amateurs and rookies, the objective is typically more straightforward: finish the race.
Pycock fell under this category “100%”, and doubly so after what happened to his Pedregà teammate Raúl Pascual. His Toyota Land Cruiser KZJ95 only lasted a day before crashing, sealing his fate as one of six DNFs.
“It was our first time. I don’t know if we’ll try again, but from the get-go, our goal was just to get to the end however possible,” Pycock said. “You can tell by our classification that that was our goal because obviously, we did come in pretty near the bottom.
“Our other teammates that traveled with us, they had a little bit more of ego going on. They said, ‘Oh no, we want to be in the top ten.’ Talking to the professional drivers, they said, ‘Well, if it’s your first time, don’t try and push it.’ Our friends pushed it and they rolled the car on the second stage and they were sent home because they damaged the rollbars. They made the whole effort, the whole investment, and they only got to race the Prologue on the first day and it was over for them. We’re lucky we kept our wits about us and we were true to our strategy, which was, ‘Let’s make the car survive and let’s get to the end.’”
It’s an old racing adage that “to finish first, you must first finish”. For a race like Dakar, this was tested day in and day out for Pycock, Gómez, and the crew.
“Our main strategy was conservation. Conservation of ourselves, our energy, and conservation of the car,” he explained. “The car was pretty much to the limit. We were arriving almost every day, we had broken suspensions—either rear, back, or both. We were always coming back with our hands full.
“We were making it, but the mechanics would be like, ‘[grimaces] Let’s see if we can fix this to make it go out tomorrow.’ They are magicians. They made the car able to go out every day except for one stage. There was one stage where we were not able to continue due to mechanical problems, but that was because we had a rupture in the joint to the radiator, and they had to have a custom weld onto a new radiator, and that took too much time. So there was one stage where we missed out due to mechanical failure, but that was it and we were able to restart the stage after that.”
Pycock deemed himself and Gómez “lucky that we’ve had lots of experience with the dunes in Morocco”, which they applied at Dakar.
The two relied on a strategy they call the Moors’ Way, a reference to the medieval Muslims who lived in the Maghreb and Iberian Peninsula. When navigating the dunes, they’d take a roundabout direction rather than a direct approach; although longer, the alternative was less dangerous.
“When we’re able to see the profiles of the dunes and we’re able to understand and navigate a safe way through it, I think that’s played very well to our advantage,” Pycock explained. “Some people, when they get to the dunes, they see it as a huge challenge and they’re kind of thrown back by it. But for us, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, this looks like fun.’”
Along the way, he developed a bit of a rapport with Lorenzo Delladio. Delladio is the CEO of Sportiva Shoes and a successful vintage rally driver also making his Dakar debut, taking part in a Porsche 959 Dakar. He finished just two spots ahead of Pycock in 82nd overall (62nd for cars).
“We kept on bumping into him all the time,” Pycock recalled. “It was incredible. It was such an experience because he had many mechanical problems but he was always able to solve. We were going on like, ‘Oh, this guy is screwed. We won’t be seeing him again,’ and then in the next stage, he’s there again. You’re like, ‘Oh wow, you made it! How did you do it?’
“I remember the second dune day. There was one day where Fran and I left, we got out of the car because we wanted to climb up the dune and find some visibility. We saw him walking around the dunes and we’re like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’. He was walking with his accelerator pedal in his hand and I’m saying like, ‘What the hell?’, and he said, ‘Yeah, we flew.’ They went up the dune, they flew over the other side. His navigator was taken out in the helicopter, and he was just walking around with the accelerator pedal in his hand. Unbelievably, in the next stage, he was there again. He not only had backups for the car, but he had a backup navigator that he could use to continue the race. It was an amazing experience. That guy, hands down, those people are crazy. Nothing will stop them.”
The #756’s best daily finish was a 59th in Stage 9. After two weeks of working through the different regularity and dune tests, the Pajero made it back to Yanbu in 84th overall.
This was it. This was the culmination of years of rallies and effort for Pycock and Gómez. It was a lot for both to take in as they crossed the finish, and rightly so.
“You have all the technology in the car and you have the little navigator where you receive instructions from the organization in Dakar. When you make it to the final podium, a little notification pops up and says, ‘Congratulations, you made it!’,” Pycock stated. “That was just before going up the podium.
“Fran and I, we both looked at the notification, we looked at ourselves, and we had tears falling down our eyes. We’re like, ‘Oh shit, we made it. It’s incredible, but we made it.’ It was an amazing moment. When you think of it now, it doesn’t seem like such an important moment, but at the time, I’d say it’s a life-changing moment. It is an achievement that only a very small percentage of the world population can say they’ve done. Yeah, it feels like a huge achievement.”
To make it even sweeter, completing the race meant their Pajero finally slayed the demons which haunted it. The team was in awe too.
Pycock quipped, “The mechanics at the beginning, they were like, ‘Yeah, okay. Well, good luck. Blah, blah, blah.’ Then, after a few days, their faces started to change like, ‘Wow, these guys are actually making it.’ The closer we got to the end, the more surprised the mechanics were. They were like, “Oh, you’re here again!” It’s like some days, they weren’t expecting us to make it back.
“We can say that the curse is completely lifted. When we finished the next day, we already received three offers to buy the car from us. It’s the complete opposite now: now it’s not a cursed vehicle, now it has the seal of approval. Boom, this car can actually complete Dakar. We had three offers the next day and we said no to all of them because we want to continue using the car and we’re happy with it.
“Before the next race, it still needs some work. Poor thing. But we’ll take care of it and we’ll keep it safe.”
Beyond Dakar
With how much Dakar demands out of you, it can be quite the shift returning home after those two weeks in the desert. For Pycock, he got back to business as the CEO of VA361. The company began life as Visionarea before undergoing 2.5 years of restructuring into its current identity.
Audiovisual production and rally raids are two completely different realms, but he found applications that translate from one to the other and vice versa.
“There is a certain mindset of never giving up, always finding the solution,” commented Pycock. “There is lots of resilience, lots of grit. There’s years and years of experience of pushing through and pushing through. I think that has helped both ways.
“What I’ve learned in my business has helped me come through Dakar, and after Dakar, I have brought back new ways of thinking about business. It’s amazing. It’s incredible how two things so different can actually have crossovers with knowledge, tasks, and learning.”
Of course, as challenging as Dakar is, he’s not going to go around saying that was the toughest thing he’s ever had to do in his life. It obviously is the case as a driver, but with all that he’s gone through personally as a father and entrepreneur, it’s virtually a walk in the park.
“It is something that you need to prepare for. It is something that is going to push you to your limits for those two weeks,” he started. “There are going to be moments where you’re going to be saying, ‘What are we actually doing here?’
“But even if it is a really hard challenge, life has thrown so many challenges at us. During COVID, we had to liquidate businesses, we had to fire huge amounts of people, we had to rebuild, we had to pivot our businesses, and then on top of that, also family life is a very hard task too. Huge challenge, but it obviously it falls short with the bigger challenges of life. I don’t think they can be compared in the same categories.”
One of those personal challenges concerns his physical health. When he did the Panda Raid for the first time, he weighed 135 kilograms (297 pounds). By 2023, that ballooned to 152 kg (335 lb). Wanting to change, he underwent a rigorous fitness program that included a variety of disciplines—such as CrossFit, HYROX, powerlifting, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu—and major lifestyle changes. His transformation has garnered attention from outlets like Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness.
“Throughout my life, whenever I’ve gone on a weight loss journey, I always considered it like a temporary diet or a temporary restriction,” Pycock said. “What changed this time is I have planned it out as a lifestyle change. It’s not, ‘I am going to do this diet or I am going to achieve this weight.’ It is, ‘I am going to change the way I live to become the person I want to be.’ If you integrate small habits one at a time and you keep at it for a constant time, then the changes come. In the end, the new you becomes the you, and the old you stops to exist.
“It’s not so much as you are doing a challenge or doing a diet. It is, you are transforming yourself. You’re becoming somebody new. I think that’s the right way to approach it. It doesn’t need to be a radical change. It just needs to be small habits that can be sustained in time that make you a different version of you.”
By Dakar, his weight had fallen to 100 kg (220 lb). Naturally, the slimmer body made tackling the Classic a lot easier than it would’ve while out of shape.
“Could I have done it in my previous weight? Maybe. Would I have suffered a lot more? Yes, for sure,” he continued. “Thanks to the few years of training I’ve been doing previously, I am in a physical state where I’m probably in my best physical state ever. That has helped a lot.
“I’m not saying it will impede, and you will see all types of physiques and all types of people participating in Dakar, but I would have to say that it has been a great advantage. Even if it’s just the comfort of getting in and getting out of the car, it’s a completely different story with that weight difference. Even that little detail or the bucket seats, general comfort makes it a lot easier at this body weight and this strength than the previous me.
“Some people will say motorsport is not a sport. I consider motorsport definitely a sport. There is a huge physical part to it. Yes, the car is doing all the mechanical hard work with the terrain, but the endurance that you have to have in an off-road race is huge. The strength you need in upper body, the strength that you need if you have to change tires in really bad terrain, the endurance you have to have to be able to unbury the car in the sand, there’s a huge physical component to it.”
In the spring after Dakar, he and Gómez launched a docuseries titled This Is (Not) The Way. The two had plugged the project as their team name at the Dakar starting podium before publishing their work beginning in March. The first episode followed them meeting the founder of Malferida, a Spanish soft drink. As of this interview’s publication, they have released four mainline episodes and two bonuses along with a mini-episode focusing on Dakar. Six more episodes are planned for later in the year.
The project kicked off in around 2020.
“We travel all over the world for our business. We go to amazing places and everybody said, ‘Well, you need to record. You’re living these experiences, you’re traveling to these places, but you’re not sharing that with the world,’” Pycock explained. “So we decided we’d create this little project to record that, but we had to give it a reason for being, not just recording our travels because it seemed very shallow to us.
“We decided to create a project where what we would do was travel around the world for our business, but also interact and take along with us young entrepreneurs that were just starting out on their business, so that we could give visibility to other people that are looking to start their own business, for people to understand that there are many different ways of making a living and that not necessarily, it always has to be working for somebody else. You can be self-employed. You can create your own project, that kind of stuff. That’s how it was born.
“It’s just a little project. There’s no specific monetization idea behind it. We just want to share with the world, get it out there, and hopefully just inspire people.”
Besides globetrotting, Pycock also got back behind the wheel for a slightly different adventure. In June, he participated in the Spanish final for the Defender Trophy. It is a competition put on by Land Rover in a similar vein to the old Camel Trophy. While the Camel Trophy was called off after 2000, the Defender Trophy is a spiritual successor that gave Pycock a chance to complete two of his childhood dreams in the same year alongside Dakar.
“When I was a kid, it used to be called the Camel Trophy. I think most people will know it as the Camel Trophy,” Pycock began. “Because of how the world works these days, to create an actual Camel Trophy would be logistically impossible, I think. Defender has taken it upon themselves to do the best they can. It was a four-day endurance test where we had physical tests, we had lots of driving tests also, and we also had to put the car through different challenges. We had to get a car across a river without using the engine. All sorts of different challenges.
“It was great fun. For me, it was amazing because I’m quite senior at my age. Most of the people there were probably 20-something years younger than me, but it was amazing. The spirit was there. The original Camel Trophy spirit was present there. There was so much collaboration, there was learning, there was support between the teams, it was really nice. Unfortunately, I did injure my foot on the second day, but I decided not to inform the medics because I didn’t want to get pulled out of the race. I knew if they found I had a fractured toe, they would probably want to pull me, so I kept quiet and I managed to finish the challenge. As soon as I got back home, I did go to the hospital and get it checked out.
“But it was amazing. We did nighttime orienteering, we did obstacle courses in nature, we did extreme driving techniques, it was really, really good. I just feel that I am so grateful to have been able to participate in something like that. It’s been a gift for me.”
As one can guess from the name, the Defender Trophy is conducted using the Land Rover Defender. For Pycock, whose racing experience has come in a Panda and a 33-year-old Pajero, the Defender feels almost futuristic by comparison.
“That is some incredible technology,” he proclaimed. “When I was doing some of the extreme obstacle courses with the car, the only thought that came to me is like, ‘Overlanding and off-roading is over.’ Anybody with this car can get anywhere. You could be like on the top of bloody Everest and you could find a mom coming back from grocery shopping and she’d be able to make it there.
“That damn car. Oh my God, the technology involved in the off-road systems is just incredible. Before, you’d have to be thinking a lot about what you’re doing, where you’re positioning the wheels, about traction, where you’re going to lose traction, about where you need to balance the weight of the vehicle, all of it is automatic. That damn thing will just go up a straight wall. It doesn’t care. It just goes up. It’s amazing. I mean, it blew me away completely.”
While the Defender name goes back nearly four decades, Jaguar Land Rover has been especially vigilant in promoting the reboot following its 2020 debut. This is evident in the rally world too with Defender Rally, who snapped Toyota’s win streak in the Stock category at this year’s Dakar before doing nearly the entire World Rally-Raid Championship.
Defender Rally is only contracted to run through 2028, but JLR’s investment into the sport is more than noticeable. Pycock got to spend a morning with Sara Price at Dakar and was impressed by what the team had set up in the bivouac.
“We talked about Dakar City, but then within Dakar City, there’s a small city which is called Defender City,” he recalled. “Those people, oh my God, the budgets they must manage. They had the five tents for the five cars, at least five mechanics for every car, both the manpower and everything that is put into that, they have an incredible team. It was just incredible to watch. That comes through also in what they achieved in the race, but that that car is brilliant. Now, there’s talk of a road-legal version of a Defender Dakar coming out. I’d like to see that.”
As announced in late October, the 2027 Dakar Rally will take place in Portugal and Morocco after being pushed out of Saudi Arabia by the war in the Middle East. Although Pycock lives in Spain and is familiar with racing in Morocco, he won’t be on the grid. With Dakar already crossed off their bucket list, he and Gómez intend on “having a rest for now” before tackling the Rallye du Maroc or RallyClassics Africa next year.
Still, he’d love to check the Dakar out when he can.
“It will be really good fun to see Dakar come back to Africa,” he added. “There is a possibility that even if we’re not participating, we might make a little escapade down there for a few days and see some people. It could be fun just to visit the camps and maybe get a little bit of involvement even if we’re not racing this time.”
The Original Spirit of Dakar
The ASO’s decision to move the Dakar back to Africa has generated much enthusiasm. While the Africa Eco Race has filled the void left by the Dakar’s departure, many still wanted to see the real McCoy return to its roots. Now that it’s happening (sort of; the new route’s African leg doesn’t go to Senegal and stays exclusively in Morocco), it’s as close to the Paris–Dakar as you’ll get from the OG rally.
Still, there are some who feel the Dakar has strayed too far from what made it great. Regardless of where it’s held, critics of the modern Dakar think it’s become too corporatized and driven by sponsors, deviating from when amateurs and adventurers were insane enough to tackle such a grueling race. Pycock likewise knows the Dakar has become a more serious race and commitment such that the main Rally, as much as he’d like to do it someday, is unfeasible.
“The dedication that we’d have to put in, I don’t think we could do it,” he admitted. “You’d have to get really serious and you’d have to participate in all the races. You’d have to get your classifications right from the beginning. Just the sheer amount of not only money—because money is a huge factor, you need to have a good team behind you—but also the dedication that it requires. I don’t think it’s something that we could give because both Fran and I still run the business, we are very family focused. I think as amateurs we enjoy a lot, but moving on to the pro side, I think would be too much of a scope for us.”
That’s one of the many reasons why the Dakar Classic is so special. That’s not to say the Rally doesn’t have characters, but there’s something beautiful about the Classic’s eclectic cast being amateurs having fun in race cars and trucks from the glory years.
There are businessmen like Pycock, Gómez, and Delladio. Pascual works as a dentist. Henry Favre stole everyone’s hearts this year with his Mitsubishi Delica minivan, three years after coming to Dakar as a journalist. Pom’Family Racing and Gazelles Offroad Team, fellow debutants in 2026, respectively raced on a €70,000 budget with a Lada built by a movie vehicle rental studio and a Land Rover blessed by actress Joanna Lumley. Overall winner Karolis Raišys is an actual professional rally driver, but still showed up with the oldest car in the field.
The cultural divide between Rally and Classic competitors is noticeable in the bivouac, though Pycock emphasizes the former are pleasant folks too.
“On the Rally side, there is a little bit more of fame going on,” he noted. “There are all sorts. There are people that are very close and approachable, and then there are other teams that’re not so much. They don’t like to mingle. But in general, most people will interact. You can chat and you can share time with some of the teams and it just depends on the team, also their stress moment. You will find them sometimes extremely stressed, sometimes they’ll be more relaxed, so it depends on finding the right moment and finding the right opportunity. But definitely, the conversations and the mingling is there.
“If you’re participating, there is an opportunity to go and say hi to those amazing drivers there and respect to them. They really have a hard job too. It’s probably the hardest challenge on Earth.”
Sure, the Classic isn’t a speed-based event like the Rally. Pycock even laughed that regularity “can just become very, very boring” at times but is also “very, very tiring because you’re trying to keep the speeds and be as precise as possible for so many hours. Sometimes, it’s a bit too much.” Still, for a driver who’s basically an average Joe compared to Nasser Al-Attiyah or Stéphane Peterhansel to grind it out in the desert for a fortnight alongside them might evoke memories not unlike the latter’s halcyon days.
And to do so in the same vehicles that made the Dakar Rally one of the biggest off-road races in the world? If it wasn’t for the regularity format, location, and high video quality as technology improved, the Classic would be a near-spitting image of a ’90s Paris–Dakar broadcast on Eurosport. The last two Classics also incorporated a mass start like the African era, with 2026’s occurring in Stage 8.
“I think it’s the beauty of man and machine,” Pycock said. “Obviously, if you’re doing the actual Dakar and you’re racing FIA, it’s a different race. Those people are racing for speed. They’re not racing regularity, and the machines they have are just next level. They’re nowhere near comparable to what we’re driving.
“But for us, I think it’s because it is closer to the original spirit. It’s more about a combination of race and survival, because there is a survival element to it. The day that we broke the radiator in the race was a very good example of that because we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for seven hours before we were rescued. Seven hours in the Arabian desert in the middle of nowhere, it started to feel like survival because we were hiding from the sun and then we were shivering with the cold, and then finally we got picked up by the rescue trucks. The nearest road link was about 80 kilometers away of off-road. We were linked onto the truck and we were dragged across rocks at five km/h for 80 kilometers. What was left of us was dumped to the road to try and make it back to camp before the next day.
“I don’t think any of the FIA racers go through a similar experience. I think their support team is different, how they work obviously because they are really fighting for a classification is different, but it’s a different experience altogether. I believe that our experience is more closer to the original idea of Dakar.”
Whether it be the Classic or the Rally, or going as a fan or competitor, it’s still an experience of a lifetime. To Pycock, who has had one life-changing experience after another whether it be his fitness or tackling the crown jewel rally raid, he wants to see people do the same and go through whatever door is open.
“If anybody actually has the opportunity and they’re thinking about it, they need to stop thinking about it and just go and do it,” Pycock concluded. “No matter, it’s one of these things in life that you’re never going to regret. No matter what happens, whether you make it, don’t make it, it’s still an incredible experience to live. If you have the opportunity, you got to do it.”
Interview on YouTube
Featured image credit: Aurélien Vialatte / ASO
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