‘Driving my dad’s Lada across the desert’ – Tales from the Dakar Classic

“They managed to get a lift on a truck back to Algeria, then spent a few nights in a hotel waiting for the boat home.

“One morning they woke and found everything from inside the car had been stolen, no papers, no passports, nothing.

“It was not a happy ending. I still have a newspaper from the time when he was interviewed by a local journalist and he said, ‘I will never come back to the Dakar!’ Of course, he changed his mind…”

Bitten by the rally raid bug, Grabowski’s father would run the Dakar twice more in a Toyota as a support vehicle driver, with the Lada gathering dust in the garage back in France.

Years later, his son would sit by the wheel of the car as a child, imagining himself taking on the dunes and desert in the little Russian hatchback.

Eventually the Lada was sold before Grabowski’s father passed away. His son got the idea to remember his old man in the best way possible, trying to finish the rally he started four decades ago. Purchasing an identical Lada in 2018, which he has gradually built up from photographs and research of the ’81 event to be totally faithful to the original Dakar version, the Frenchman feels he may have had more than a little help from someone looking down on him.

As well as managing to hook up with Christophe Fay’s ‘tout-le-niva.com’, the largest Niva parts dealer in France – who took roughly “twenty seconds”, to be convinced to come along for the ride with a full complement of spares – Grabowksi and Chenard have had other considerable assistance appearing at times as if from nowhere.

“Sometimes when you when you lose someone, you still believe they’re somewhere,” he says. “Coming here I have the feeling I’m sharing something with him.”

“Many times during the project, you had the feeling that at some he was helping us,” says Chenard.

“One day we were rushing to get the car ready in the workshop, it was looking like we wouldn’t make it,” recalls Grabowksi. “A car pulled up, out got a father and his two kids, in their 20s.

“We installed bigger suspension, a bigger tank and an engine filtration system,” he says.

Rizzardi has previously taken part in the main event in a truck in 2015, but as opposed to the adrenalin rush of beating the clock, he also appreciates the challenge of getting vintage machinery over the line.

“The modern Dakar is another game,” he says. “It’s more about passion, being comfortable in the car taking it comfortably, having pleasure to the end.

“Kilometre-wise it’s almost the same. But the way you approach the tracks, the special stages are completely different.

“We take it easy – although we have to wake up at 4 in the morning!”

Whilst some drivers aren’t in it to win it, others are used to visiting the podium – it’s even in their blood.

Senegal-born Marc Douton won the first classic last year in a 179 Sunhill buggy, and now is taking on the event in a 1985 911 Safari Type G.

“I was at the Dakar arrival for four years from 1980 – it was my dream to compete in it,” he says. “I had the opportunity to do it when I was a biker competing in rally raids, but couldn’t because of my job. I had to forget the dream until the Classic showed up.

“Obviously the level is not the same [as the modern Dakar], but the pleasure is.”

As well as the beautiful, the bivouac also plays host to the bizarre. Diego Delespaux’s ‘Mad Maxxed’ ’67 VW Beetle is one such example.

The Belgian mechanic completely reimagined the vintage car to get it ready for the Classic, and the results are spectacular.

As his co-driver Betrand Droupsy explains, pure passion for rallying pushes the competitors to the limit and beyond, not just on the special stages but also in preparing the cars.

“Diego began to build the car in June this year – a lot of people didn’t believe our car would be ready for the first test in September, but we made it!” he says.

Droupsy comments that just being part of the event is special.

“Everyone asks after everyone,” he says. “It’s not about competition – it’s a great spirit.”