The Dakar Rally special series
On January 19th, 2024, SUN Xiangyan (孙相燕) became the first Chinese woman to have finished the Dakar Rally. Before the Chinese New Year, we caught up with SUN Xiangyan who have come back to Guangzhou for some hard-earned rest after the grueling marathon. As our Year of Loong Chinese New Year special feature, here is SUN Xiangyan’s reflection on her first adventure in the Dakar Rally.
© All photos, including featured cover, provided by SUN Xiangyan
In 2016, GUO Meiling became the first Chinese woman to participate in the Dakar Rally, the iconic off-road marathon. Back in China that same year, another adventure toward the Dakar Rally started in the desert of Inner Mongolia. It’s the journey of SUN Xiangyan in desert rally raid. Eight years later in 2024, Xiangyan became the second Chinese woman to participate in the Dakar and the first ever Chinese woman to finish the whole marathon.
Xiangyan had her first entanglement with motorsport in 2012. Before that, she had only seen coverage of motorsport on TV. When she was only seeing others doing it, she thought they were insane. But when she got behind the wheel, everything changed. “The rally world in China only started to develop this century, I’ve never experienced it in real life. In 2012, a Toyota Highlander club organized an annual gathering in Suzhou. They dug up some holes and put up some slopes in an area as an off-road track. I was there first as a passenger. I thought they were insane. There were ponds and ditches everywhere, why would they want to drive through that for fun? Then I tried driving, and when the adrenaline kicked in, it was actually quite fun!!!”
After her first taste in off-road motorsport, Xiangyan started to participate in regional club events to get more fun experience in motorsport. In her late 30s, she found this new passion and something she was quite good at. “We have this track close by. I would go every day to practice a few dozen laps. I think I did hundreds if not thousands of laps there. I just feel like this is a really fun thing to do! I also got faster and faster of course. I bought a Jeep Wrangler for off-road racing and started going to regional club races in Jiangsu.”
In Jiangsu, Xiangyan gradually built up her skills, experience, and confidence. Then she moved up to a more challenging venue – the desert in Inner Mongolia. “I first went in the desert in 2015. You follow other people to go through it. Then in 2016, I started to race in the desert. The race would be for just one day, with a distance of 100-200km.”
The desert isn’t like anything else, it does not ever stay the same. The dunes move around. With the wind blowing by, your racing track changes. It’s the ultimate off-road challenge to race in the desert.
So far, Xiangyan had still been racing in regional events. In 2018, she stepped into her first national desert rally – the Taklimakan Rally. The real preparation for Dakar also started here. “I always knew about the Dakar, but I also knew I didn’t have the ability to participate immediately. I really admire GUO Meiling. I needed basic skills and seat time of racing in the desert. It takes time. I know if I can participate in the Dakar at least once, it would be a dream come true, and I can cross it off my bucket list. I won’t have any regrets.”
I think racing in the desert is the most difficult, and the Dakar is of course the most difficult among all desert rally raids.
From Taklimakan and other national races, Xiangyan gathered more than 100,000 km of experience in the desert, more than most of the Chinese drivers. In 2023, she finally feels ready. “I told my husband I wanted to try it. It’s my dream. He’s been really supportive. I started training in March.”
First things first, Xiangyan needed a car for Dakar. The production cars she had been racing in wouldn’t cut it. “We went to HAN Wei and asked to use his team’s buggy for Dakar. They’ve raced it in the Dakar for four or five years. The car can handle it, and his team know the rules well. I’ve never driven a rear-wheel drive car before. The driving style is completely different, you have to keep a high speed driving a rear-wheel drive car otherwise you get stuck. There are also a lot of buttons on the car that I’m not familiar with. I used the buggy to race in the Taklimakan Rally and Circle Poyang Lake Rally this year to get to know the car better. HAN was actually surprised that I wanted to go at first. After all, there has only been one Chinese woman at the Dakar before. But he’s also been very supportive. He knows I have a lot of experience in the desert. His support is a confidence boost for me.”
Having a car and a team, the most important preparation then fell on Xiangyan herself and her co-driver TIAN Yu. “I’m a bit lazy before, not a fitness junky. But in 2023, to prepare for Dakar, I was running and going to the gym a lot. I need to be physically ready for the grueling marathon. Sometimes if I get lazy again, my husband would cheer me up, reminding me of what my goal is. My co-driver also prepared a lot. Besides the same physical training, he also needs to get himself familiarized with the electronic roadbook, which is not available in our national races in China.”
With all the preparation under her belt, the desert in Saudi still welcomed Xiangyan in its most monstrous form. On her first two special stages, Xiangyan encountered some of the most difficult situations you need to deal with in the desert. “In Taklimakan, we would race during the day. But in Dakar, there are so many vehicles from different categories, a lot of times when you start the day, it’s already in the afternoon. At 5:30pm it starts to get dark. You race a long distance in the dark in the desert. On my first day, I almost fell off the cliff because it was too dark to see. Then the next day, we got stuck in the sand trying to avoid another car. It took us two hours to get our car out. In the end, we drove 3 kilometers in the dark in the desert. It was perhaps the longest 3 kilometers in my life. It’s really dangerous racing in the Dakar.”
The night after finishing SS2, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking, I was so close to death the day before, why would I come to do this dangerous and difficult thing? Maybe I should give up right here right now. But of course, the next day when I woke up I stopped thinking about it. When I finished the race that day, I knew I couldn’t just give up on this.
Danger didn’t stop at the start. Approaching the end of the whole marathon, a new challenge found its way to Xiangyan. “We had a flat tyre during SS11 so we got out of the car. When we got back in, my helmet just wouldn’t get in place. It was slipping down a lot. When I was struggling with my helmet, I pushed into the wrong gear, and damaged our gearbox. After that, we couldn’t go full throttle. Because we couldn’t go fast, we then got stuck in the sand at this dune again. We were lucky we got the car out fast this time, but along the whole way, we were worried something might happen because we couldn’t go fast. It was really hard to race alone in the Dakar. It would be much easier if several cars from the same team could go together and cover for each other.”
Weathering through all the difficulties, Xiangyan reached Yanbu as the first Chinese woman to finish Dakar. She placed 43rd in the T1 Ultimate category and 108th in the entire car category.
As her first Dakar, with all the difficulties she encountered, this was a great learning experience. “We were holding back a little bit at the beginning. We wanted to get familiar with everything first, and ease into the racing. But we see the professional drivers go full throttle ALL THE WAY. When they go past you, especially if a truck overtakes you, the sand they blow up would blind you for a long time. We now know you always have to run at the limit at the Dakar. We now know we have to be mentally strong, to not give up whenever.”
For the next Dakar, Xiangyan still wants to take up the challenge. She has a new goal and a better idea of where she needs to work on. “I still need to raise my level of physical training. I also need driving experience in the Gobi desert or deeply rutted track. I aim to have a better result next year, especially if I can avoid penalties.”
We wish Xiangyan all the best in her future adventures!
Paddock Sorority 
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