[cycleworld.com] - MV Agusta Hosts Dakar Rally 2023 Kickoff

[Ninjette Newsbot]

The Dakar Rally is a motorcycling classic. MV Agusta hosted a kickoff party with the Lucky Explorer 9.5.

Click here to view on their site.


Dunes like this? Giant fuel tank? Must be Dakar! The venue and the machines have changed over the decades, but the spirit of the rally has never wavered. Here we see Ciro de Petri riding to a podium finish on a Cagiva Elefant 900 in 1990. A fellow Cagiva team member won that year. (MV Agusta/)For centuries, the Sahara Desert has fascinated adventurers and explorers as an arena for individual challenge or a well-organized expedition. In 1977, it was the backdrop for the first Paris-Dakar Rally. The idea came to French rider Thierry Sabine the year before when he was lost in the desert on his motorcycle. He then devoted all his energies and enthusiasm to organize the first P-D, which saw 182 participants, in race cars and motorcycles, over the roughly 6,200 miles between Paris and Dakar, the capital of Senegal in West Africa.

The Birth of Paris-Dakar

At first, all the entries were privateer teams. The spirit was fabulous, and great comradeship grew out of sharing such a grueling challenge. Only 74 of the original 182 teams made it to the finish, but the event was an enormous success. Paris-Dakar became an instant rally classic, and the number of entries rapidly grew from year to year.

By 1983 the factories got involved. BMW developed a very special R80GS ridden by French specialist Hubert Auriol that blew everybody else into the camel thorns. The next year Porsche entered two factory 911s, one driven by no less a figure than world F1 champion Jackie Ickx alongside one by Renè Meige; they won. From then on it was the big leagues; privateers were racing simply for the pleasure of being there, mastering the challenge, and surviving. To have a chance of winning took the solid technical support only a real team could provide.


This year’s “Ceremony of Presentation” for the 2023 Dakar Rally was held at MV Agusta’s facility, a suitable choice since MV owns the Cagiva brand and has a couple of Dakar-inspired models in its lineup. (MV Agusta/)Auriol’s R80GS started a long period where twin-cylinder machines dominated the motorcycle results. After the R80GS came Honda’s NXR750/800, which in turn passed the baton to the Cagiva Elefant 900, to be followed by the Yamaha YZE750/850 with a brief interruption by the Elefant 900 again.

In 1989 a single again won, when BMW caught everybody off guard with its F650RR. This bike used a 650cc Rotax engine developed in cooperation with Aprilia. The BMW single won again the following year; after that it was KTM’s turn, starting with its LC4 660R. In 2002 it switched to its mighty LC8 950R twin, only to field a single again in 2003, the more agile LC4 660R; it followed this up in 2007 with the evolution 690 Rally. In 2011 agility dominated in the form of the KTM 450 Rally, a bike that held the scepter all the way to 2019. In 2020 American Ricky Brabec won aboard the vastly renewed Honda CRF450 Rally, a machine which also won the following year. The big surprise came in 2022 when a GasGas 450 Rally took first place.


The 2023 rally route: More than 6,000 miles of challenging terrain—and weather—in Saudi Arabia. (MV Agusta/)Today the event is just called the Dakar Rally. Thierry Sabine died in a 1986 helicopter crash, and the organization was taken over by his father Gilbert. But something of the original spirit was lost with Thierry. In 1989, Gilbert Sabine sold to Amaury Sport Organization.

The original route had already been modified due to a series of tribal conflicts in Africa, and in 2009 the Dakar Rally migrated to South America, after a one-year cancellation. For the next 10 years the rally ran through Argentina, Peru, and Chile, moving in 2020 to the deserts of Saudi Arabia’s Arabian Peninsula.


The men who started it all: On the left in the black cap is the late Thierry Sabine, founder of the original Paris-Dakar Rally. On the right is desert ace Hubert Auriol, who won for BMW in 1981 and 1983 before crossing over to the dark side and racing—shudder—cars, where he won a third title. This image is from 1986, when he raced a factory Cagiva 860 twin. (MV Agusta/)Saudi Arabia offers immense open desert spaces with a unique menu of challenges: tricky sand dunes, quicksand, rough ground, all under an unrelenting, hammering sun. The 2023 edition of the Dakar Rally will start December 31, 2022, from the Sea Camp, west of Medina, driving up north and then turning east and then all the way down southeast to the border with Oman. From there it heads up again northwest to finally reach the finish by the Persian Gulf at Daman, where the survivors will arrive more than two weeks later. The route will exceed 10,000 kilometers and will be the longest ever, divided in 14 stages that will take the competitors through mountain trails covered with razor-sharp stones, and an ocean of dunes known as Empty Quarter.


Edi Orioli again, this time in 1988, flicking the big Cagiva around like an MX bike. The 2023 MVs are distant relatives of this legendary Italian family of machines. (MV Agusta/)The organizers of the 2023 Dakar Rally, led by director David Castera, selected the MV Agusta factory in Schiranna for the official presentation of the competition. MV per se has had nothing to do with African rallies, but remember that Cagiva became part of MV in the late 1990s, and that Cagiva was a legit Dakar player: It won the Paris-Dakar twice in 1990 and 1994 with the Elefant 900, and finished on the podium every year in between.

More than 300 journalists from across Europe gathered for the 2023 presentation in Schiranna. Most of the old Cagiva team were there, including two-time winner Edi Orioli, technical manager Roberto Azzalin, and most of the technical team that developed and supported the winning Elefant 900. The Dakar 2023 presentation also offered MV the opportunity of promoting its new Lucky Explorer 5.5 and 9.5 models, two bikes that replicate the general styling and graphics of the old Cagiva Elefant 900 racers.

Here’s to some great racing in 2023.


The current MV Agusta Lucky Explorer 9.5 concept bike, which harks back to Cagiva’s glory days in Paris-Dakar. The powerplant is an MV-built 931cc inline-triple. (MV Agusta/)