Dakar 2026, final bike classification: the top ten places hold five Hondas, three KTMs and two Heros. The race went to Luciano Benavides on a KTM, by two seconds over Ricky Brabec and his Honda, after two weeks and almost eight thousand kilometres of Saudi desert. Different brands, different colours, different budgets. And yet today’s Dakar bikes have one thing in common that does not depend on who builds them: the engine cannot exceed 450cc.

That number is the starting point for understanding which bikes are used at the Dakar, how they are built and why they look so alike. It is also a sign of how much the race has changed since the 1980s, when the bikes at the front kept getting bigger and faster.

What engine size do Dakar bikes have

Today the maximum engine size is 450cc. The limit applies both to RallyGP, the class for the most experienced riders, which counts towards the FIM World Rally-Raid Championship (the Dakar is the first of its five rounds), and to Rally2, open to everyone else, which counts towards the World Cup. The two bikes that have shared the most recent editions, the KTM 450 Rally and the Honda CRF450 Rally, use a four-stroke single of around 449cc.

It was not always like this. In the 1980s the Dakar bike race had become a power race: the Honda NXR750, which won four editions in a row up to 1989, was a V-twin capable of around 180 kilometres an hour. In 1994 the organisers tried to curb the growth in engine sizes, weights and speeds by requiring bikes derived from production models: according to Honda’s account, to reduce fatal accidents. The 450cc limit came in stages: in 2011 it applied to the elite riders, and from 2012 it has applied to every bike entered. It ended the era of singles of around 650cc (the KTM 690 Rally, despite its name, had 654cc), with the aim of making the bikes a little slower.

The bike classes at the Dakar

At the Dakar the bikes start together, but they do not all race for the same classification. RallyGP is the class of the most experienced riders, mostly from the factory teams, who fight for the overall win. Rally2 is for everyone else, from privateers to the young riders of the factory teams: in 2026 it was won by Slovenia’s Toni Mulec, on a KTM of the BAS team, ninth overall and a first for Slovenia at the Dakar. Then there is Original by Motul, formerly Malle Moto, the class for riders without team assistance, which in 2026 went to France’s Benjamin Melot, also on a KTM.

At the start in Yanbu there were 115 bikes. How the race works, from the stages to the roadbook, is covered in our article on how the Dakar works.

How a Dakar bike is built

A Dakar bike looks like a competition enduro bike, but one glance tells you it is something else. In front of the handlebars sits the navigation tower, which holds the tablet with the digital roadbook, identical for everyone and supplied by the organisers, along with the instruments for following the route. The fuel is carried in several tanks, front and rear, for a total of around 35 litres: that is the figure Honda gives for the factory CRF450 Rally and KTM for the 450 Rally Replica, the version it sells to privateers. They are there to cover the long stretches between one refuelling point and the next.

The suspension has around 30 centimetres of travel (on the factory Honda, 310 millimetres at the front and 305 at the rear), because for hundreds of kilometres a day it has to soak up rocks, holes and dunes. And since 2021, after the 2020 edition cost the lives of Paulo Gonçalves and Edwin Straver, riders have had to wear a mandatory airbag vest, and in some zones they cannot exceed 90 kilometres an hour.

Anyone who wants to race the Dakar on a bike very close to the factory machines can, in fact, buy one: the 2026 KTM 450 Rally Replica was put on sale as a limited series of 150 units, plus five from a special series dedicated to Daniel Sanders.

The brands that have won the Dakar most often

The first Dakar, which left Paris on 26 December 1978 and reached Dakar on 14 January 1979, was won by Cyril Neveu on a Yamaha XT500, ahead of Gilles Comte on the same bike. In all, across 47 editions (the 2008 race was cancelled), the bike classification has been won by just six brands. KTM is by far the most successful, with 21 wins, eighteen of them in a row between 2001 and 2019. Behind it come Yamaha with 9 wins, Honda with 8, BMW with 6 and Cagiva with 2. GasGas has won once, in 2022 with Sam Sunderland, on a bike that was in effect a KTM 450 Rally under another name.

In recent years the Dakar bike race has become a duel between KTM and Honda. Honda ended the Austrian run in 2020 with Brabec, won again in 2021 with Kevin Benavides and in 2024 with Brabec once more; KTM answered in 2023 with the same Kevin Benavides, in 2025 with Daniel Sanders and in 2026 with Luciano Benavides, Kevin’s brother. Behind them, in 2026, Hero brought Ignacio Cornejo and Ross Branch home in seventh and eighth place.

Dakar bikes through a sponsor’s eyes

For a brand, the bike is the most visible space at the Dakar and at the same time the smallest: a fairing, the tank, the helmet and the suit of the person riding it. For two weeks, though, that space appears in the images of every stage, in the content riders post from the bivouac, in the stories of a race that produces one a day, like the two seconds between Benavides and Brabec. In motorcycle racing the value of a sponsorship depends less on the size of the logo and more on what is built around it: the rider, the team, the story.

And with bikes ever more alike, it is people who make the difference between a presence that is remembered and one that is forgotten. We cover this on our page about Dakar sponsorship and in our article on motorcycle sponsorship, from MotoGP to the Dakar.

Forty-seven years have passed between Neveu’s XT500 and Benavides’s 450 Rally, and the engine of the bikes that win the Dakar is actually smaller. The desert, on the other hand, is still the same.