This year the race started in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal and travelled all the way down through Spain, Morocco, and other cities of Africa such as Mauritania, Mali, Guinea and finally ended in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

The conditions change quite considerably over the course of the journey. The route runs over 7,000 miles of sand, riverbeds, rocks and potholed roads.

Conditions get the most extreme when the drivers reach the shifting sands of the Sahara Desert. This is really the heart of the race.

To succeed in the Paris Dakar, requires extreme endurance and expert navigational skills. There are only two days of rest throughout the whole event and these are normally spent working on the vehicles, trying to get them to run at maximum capacity despite the problems of sand in every engine part.

Every stage runs about 300 miles with average daily temperatures in the desert of 130 Fahrenheit; dehydration is a major threat.