Sara Price Takes on the Famed 2024 Dakar Rally

Piloting an FIA-spec Can-Am Maverick X3, American driver Sara Price is ready for the world’s toughest off-road rally

January 5, 2024 – (Motor Sports NewsWire) – American racing phenom Sara Price is set to tackle what she has called “the toughest challenge I’ve faced so far in my racing career.” The 2024 Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia is like no other off-road event. It’s incredibly long, rough on machinery, sometimes unpredictable, and always demanding on drivers. Competitors will follow an approximately 5,000-kilometer course back and forth across the Arabian Peninsula over 12 stages and 14 days of racing through what is often an empty and trackless desert of nearly endless sand dunes.

A New Stage Format Twist

Starting January 5 in AlUla with a Prologue and Stage 1, the fifth edition of the Dakar in Saudi Arabia will include a new 48-hour stage format held in the Empty Quarter during which contestants will have to stop at the next bivouac they come across once the clock strikes 4 pm. They can help each other during the evening, but there will be no choice of repair companions, as the teams will be spread out over eight different bivouacs. Start the following morning will be at 7 am to complete the remaining section of the route. The 12th and final Stage will finish at Yanbu on January 15, 2024.

Price is Ready

However daunting the course may be, Price possesses the driving experience and skill to successfully face a challenge like the 2024 Dakar Rally. Her extensive motorsports resume includes motocross, short-course and desert off-road racing, and short and long-distance rally racing. A multi-vehicle driver, Price has successfully piloted everything from motorcycles and UTVs to rally race cars and 1,000-hp Trophy Trucks.

Career highlights include Price’s solo drive in a Trophy Truck to a second-place class finish over an exhaustingly rugged 800-mile-long course at the 2019 Baja 1000. Her initiation into rally racing was the 2015 Rallye Aicha des Gazelles, in which Price finished first among rookie drivers. Most recently, Price competed in the 2023 Rally du Maroc “Road to Dakar Challenge” for UTVs, scoring a second in class and making history as the first American woman to earn a stage win in the FIA World Rally-Raid Championship.

Preparation

To further her chance of success in rally racing, Price and navigator Jeremy Gray had been training with moto legend and navigation rally expert Jimmy Lewis before their impressive World…