Dakar 2023 - Day 2.

Luck favors the prepared.

But bad luck comes for everyone. In the second day of the Dakar 2023, teams that spent 11 months preparing for every single possibility that can happen in a enduro rally race saw their entire strategy fall apart due to flat tires.

The rocky section ate drivers and cars alive, slicing sidewalls and dreams relentlessly. There's something about how hard this race is that encourages you to wax poetic about the eliminations process. But the facts are, there were world class drivers looking into the camera and saying "I couldn't drive any slower or safer" and they still lost. This race breaks people. It kills them. It hurts them forever.

It isn't the clean modern unspeakable precision of F1. Those guys probably have makeup teams in the pits. It's privateers and big money all racing the same line, all trying to get somewhere, somehow, any way possible. It's about fighting the fear, accepting failure, understanding mortality, and deciding that life is worth living. Fast.