Dakar Rally 2027 — Brooks Groves

The Route

The longest Dakar in eighteen years. Since the rally left Africa, only the first South American edition has carried more competitive distance than the 5,320 kilometres of special stages waiting in Saudi Arabia this January.

It starts and finishes in the same place — King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea north of Jeddah — and spends the fortnight in the country's western and central regions rather than pushing east into the Empty Quarter. Nine of the thirteen specials run beyond 400km. Stage 10 is the monster at 515.

This page is a skeleton. ASO announced the route outline in June 2026 — distances, start and finish, the marathon stages. The stage-by-stage breakdown, with the actual bivouac towns and terrain, is usually published in November or December. Everything below marked TBA fills in then, and the stage table becomes a live tracker once the rally starts.

All Stages

#	Date	Special	Notes
P	Thu 1 Jan	30 km	Prologue — sets the running order
1	Fri 2 Jan	TBA	Heads north from KAEC
2	Sat 3 Jan	TBA
3	Sun 4 Jan	TBA
4	Mon 5 Jan	TBA
5	Tue 6 Jan	TBA
6	Wed 7 Jan	TBA	Marathon stage — no team assistance overnight
7	Thu 8 Jan	TBA	Marathon continues
—	Fri 9 Jan	Rest day	Location TBA
8	Sat 10 Jan	TBA
9	Sun 11 Jan	TBA
10	Mon 12 Jan	515 km	Longest special of the rally · returns to Bisha
11	Tue 13 Jan	TBA	Second marathon — leaves from Bisha
12	Wed 14 Jan	TBA	Marathon continues
13	Fri 15 Jan	50 km	Short final special into the finish

Dates are laid out from the announced 1–15 January window and the published stage count. The rest-day position and the exact marathon pairings will be confirmed with the detailed route.

Stages to Watch

Stage 10 · Monday 12 January

515 kilometres

The longest special of the rally, and the one that will decide it. Half a thousand kilometres of navigation on the eleventh day, when everything is already broken or nearly. It finishes back at Bisha, which then launches the second marathon the following morning — so there is no recovery built in behind it.

The two marathons

No assistance, no mechanics, no spare parts

Marathon stages take the teams away overnight. Whatever breaks, the crew fixes with what is on the vehicle, in a closed bivouac, before starting again at dawn. Two of them in one rally is unusual, and the second one lands in the last three days.

Stage 13 · Friday 15 January

Fifty kilometres to the finish

A short final special, which sounds like a formality and is not. Last January the bike title came down to two seconds after two weeks of racing. A 50km stage is exactly long enough to lose one.

A word about the trucks

The T5 class is the reason a lot of people watch this. Eight tonnes of truck, around a thousand horsepower, three crew inside — driver, co-driver, and a mechanic who spends the day being thrown around a cab with a toolkit.

They are not built to fly and they do it anyway, over dunes, at speed, landing on suspension that has to survive another two weeks. They run the same route as the bikes and the cars, in the same time, and when one of them gets stuck it takes a second truck to pull it out.