Dakar Rally 2018 Gallery

Racing through the desert, only a driver and a navigator, cut off from the remote support team and facing thousands of miles of sand and tricky dunes – what could go wrong? The Dakar Rally is well known for being challenging, as we found ourselves when we headed out to Lima, Peru to join the BMW MINI team there. They brought along a brand new John Cooper Works Buggy to put through its paces.

It's no run in the park, either. For Dakar 2018 it's fourteen stages and 9,000 kilometers, through Peru, Bolivia, and finally finishing up in Argentina. While they may look far from production, there are in fact strict limits on how far each team's cars can stray from what you'd find in your local dealership.

Meanwhile, there's the glorious scenery of Peru to enjoy, and a mobile engineering crew that makes the Bedouin-like trek along with the cars. Expect crashes, last-minute repairs, and a whole lot of sand.