On July 1, Hubert Auriol, representative of Amaury Sports Organization (ASO), the sponsor of the Dakar Rally, visited Japan. In Tokyo, he announced ASO's overall plan for the 2004 Dakar Rally. The next (26th) rally, the Telefonica Dakar 2004, will be held between January 1 and 18, 2004. While the previous rally adopted a highly original route from Marseilles to Sharm al Sheikh in Egypt, the 2004 route will follow a familiar pattern running southwards along the west coast of the African continent.

	The inspections and start will take place in the town of Auvergne near Clermont Ferrand in the mountains of central France about 400 kilometers south of Paris. Administrative procedures will start on December 29, and vehicle inspections will commence on the 30th. The first competitors will start at 12.00 noon on New Year's Day. This will be the first time a starting ceremony has been scheduled for daytime. After the prologue where the cars will depart two-by-two in a parallel piste as they did this year (2003), the vehicles will head to Narbonne in the south of France. On the following day, January 2, the vehicles will, as in 2003, encounter their first special stage on gravel roads winding through the hilly terrain of Corbieres, and will then head to Spain. On January 3, there will be a short special stage, though the location has not yet been announced. Then the vehicles will board a ferry in the harbor of Algeciras in southwest Spain and cross the Mediterranean to Africa.

			On the 4th, when the vehicles make landfall in Africa on the northern tip of Morocco, they will probably skim the Western Sahara region as they head ever further south. Passing through Mauritania and Mali, they will spend a rest day in Bobodioulasso in Burkina Faso. Then, in the second half of the race, they will head north again, returning to Mali. On January 18, they will reach the goal of the rally on the shores of salty Lake Rose near Dakar, the capital of Senegal. It has been announced that the complete course will be about 10,000 kilometers. While the course details will not be announced until late November, the course through Morocco, the beginning of the Africa section, has been set so as to ease the competitors into the race. After crossing the Atlas Mountains, competitors will suddenly come upon small sand dunes. From there, the level of difficulty will gradually increase, with Mauritania the peak of the first half. After that, undulating sand dunes, hills tufted with clumps of camel grass, and stony terrain await.

	Bobodioulasso, which the rally will visit for the first time in four years (the last visit was in 2000), is not desert but a lush green town. The second half of the race will be set in the Sahel desert region of western Mali and eastern Senegal. In this area there are many straight gravel roads, and interest is focusing on how the competitive stages will be set in the rally's final phase. The length of the special stages overall will be a little longer than in the past and there will be two marathon stages. Marathon stages span two days, and at the interim bivouac, maintenance work is severely restricted. New constraints are now under consideration.

			At this current point, no precise details about the entries are available. However, the rally is now entering its third year under the super-production regulations, which allow the participation of a wide variety of vehicles because of their recognition of wide modification scope, and the four-wheel class is expected to attract an even greater plethora of entries. The Volkswagen team, which tested the waters by participating in the previous rally with a two-wheel-drive buggy, will this time enter a four-wheel-drive Tourareg. Strong rivals - BMW X5, the Schlesser Buggy, and the Mitsubishi Pajero Evolution - will be entering in 2004, and Nissan's second Dakar challenge will be a still tougher battle than before.