Two hours from Dakar, on the shore of Lac Rose, a sandy red lake hard by Africa's Atlantic coast, a few thousand Senegalese and a thousand newly sunburned off-road racing fanatics from Europe are standing at the finish line of the 20th annual Paris-Dakar Rally.

It's only 10 a.m., but the site is already so full the Senegalese army has cordoned off the road from the nearest town. Not that that's stopped a steady stream of fans and T-shirt merchants from trickling through the barricades to the finish line, which is not really a line at all, but a huge ramped podium covered with sponsor logos and strategically placed in the middle of the beach for the TV cameras.

It seems everyone's already here but the racers. When they left from Versailles at dawn on New Year's Day, there were 349 of them -- 173 motorcycles, 115 cars and 61 trucks -- and every last one was determined to make it to all the way to Lac Rose: down the highways of France and Spain, over the Mediterranean by ferry into northern Morocco and Mauritania, east into the deserts of Mali, and then back through the Mauritanian dunes to Senegal. Seventeen days and 6,500 miles later -- the equivalent of driving from New York to Los Angeles and back without roads -- just 29 percent (55 bikes, 39 cars and eight trucks) have actually made it, and they're not rushing now.

And why should they? The winners have already been known for the last 48 hours, and everyone is utterly exhausted. "They say it takes a man on a camel 40 days to do what we do in a few hours," says Anne-Chantal Pauwels, 34, the second-place finisher in the car class, and one of the few women in the race. "My body is shaking so hard from going up and down in the sand, all I want to do is lie down."

Meanwhile, the fans are watching a fashion show of sexy Senegalese models wearing ankle-length boubous and dancing to the latest Youssou N'Dour record in the hot January sun. Suddenly two helicopters appear in the cloudless sky and the theme from "Rocky" blares over the buzz of an approaching bike. Stephen Peterhansel, the No. 1 moto -- this was his sixth Dakar victory in seven years -- speeds up the ramp on his Yamaha to tearfully accept a magnum of champagne; someone hoists his 5-year-old son on his shoulders. The media (including more than 70 TV networks) go nuts for this and rush the podium; the sponsors, fresh-faced publicistes from the Paris offices of Mobil, Euromaster, Total, etc., scramble to get their pictures taken with "their" winners -- or (at least) with Hubert Auriole, the handsome former Dakar victor who now heads the group that runs the race, TSO.

Then, as quickly as it began, it all dies down until the No. 1 car, a Mitsubishi piloted by Jean-Pierre Fontenay, finally a winner after 15 years of Dakar racing, drives up the podium, and the chaos starts again.

Oddly, the few Senegalese who can see from where they are don't seem particularly interested in what's going on; the intense security -- gendarmes on horseback with swords and AK-47s -- feels a little beside the point. Although they might never admit it, you sense that the crowd has a certain ambivalence about the race. Can it, after all, be any coincidence that for 20 years it has been held during Ramadan, the holiest time of the Islamic year, a month-long, dawn-to-dusk fast, in a country that is 85 percent Muslim?

On the other hand, it's not as if they aren't somewhat fascinated. For weeks, Senegalese politicians have speechified about how "Le Dakar" has made their city a world sports capital, the newspapers have dutifully reported on the day's racing news, and kids have lined the roads, chanting "Ral-ly! Ral-ly!" as the racers flashed by.

"People have an image of Africans as being sad, hungry and poor," says TSO's Auriole, "but if you got in my car with me, you wouldn't see people throwing stones. The things that make Africans happy are just different than the things that make Americans happy." Still, even Auriole admits that the real audience is back home in France, watching the race on television, no matter how loudly TSO may boast of increased African participation. (This year there were seven Senegalese motorcyclists and a single Tunisian car.)

Indeed, like all great colonial enterprises caught in the warp of the postmodern age -- the Gulf War, for example -- the Dakar is a kind of combat that is best witnessed on television. The military comparison is less far-fetched than it might at first seem. The Dakar certainly is planned like a military operation, a surgical strike of French vitesse and technologie into the heart of black Africa. Each day, as the rally traverses its 370-miles-per-day course, 1,500 people follow the racers in the air and on the ground: 150 TSO administrators, 40 cooks, 35 doctors and 300 journalists, only 60 of whom are lucky enough to get seats in TSO's fleet of 18 planes and four helicopters.

Like a real war, the planning begins months before the actual race. Each year, TSO -- named for Thierry Sabine, the racer who created the Paris-Dakar in 1978 and then died in a helicopter crash during the eighth rally in 1986 -- sends a reconnaissance team into the desert to scout out the route, which shrinks or expands to keep pace with regional geopolitics.

In 1988, after riots broke out in Algeria and Mali, TSO won cooperation from Moammar Gadhafi to enter Africa through Libya. But within a few years, that too became a problem, so TSO tried out some ingenious courses -- running the race all the way down the Atlantic coast to South Africa one year, in a loop from Dakar to Mali and back. Until 1993, the race was run strictly on former French colonial soil, completely bypassing non-francophone countries -- even Spain -- by ferrying the racers from southern France directly to Algeria.

However it isn't mere geopolitical caprice that induces TSO to change the map. With the winners racking up consecutive victories in recent years, criticism has forced the organization to try to blunt the advantages of the factory teams (BMW, Citroen, Yamaha, Toyota, Mitsubishi, etc.) over entrants lacking deep corporate pockets. Changing the map is one way to level the field; banning all but standard Chevy, Dodge and Ford engines in most of the car and truck classes is another. (Most of the bikes are standard 600cc hogs fitted with 12-gallon gas tanks for the long distances.) This year, TSO went even further, creating four "marathon stages" during which there would be "no airborne mechanics" and "no airborne spare parts for the motorcycles." In other words, if you broke down during one of these three marathons, you were toast.

In fact, you can't race the Dakar without some form of corporate support, no matter how hot a desert rat you are. Each racer is pushed forward by a vast, moving pit crew of highly trained mechanics equipped with any conceivable spare part that might be needed along the way. (Euromaster, one of Europe's largest tire manufacturers, packs in its trucks enough spares for every tire in the race.) Riding in huge Tatra trucks, these crews are almost as important as the drivers themselves, and in some cases they decide which of a team's many drivers will be allowed to win. Jean-Pierre Fontenay, this year's winner in the car class, has been racing with the Mitsubishi team for 15 years; this was the first year he was given enough "factory support" to lead him to victory. (Last year, he stepped aside for a Japanese Mitsubishi pilot.) Likewise, KTM, the Austrian motorcycle company, supported 30 bikes this year, but not all the bikes got the same level of support.

Of course the drivers have the toughest job, alternately thrilling and infuriating. Like wartime pilots, they're not given information about the next day's route until they've finished with the current stage. And although they are equipped with detailed maps and high-tech GPS devices, every day someone gets deeply lost -- lost enough that they can't even find the bivouac by nightfall. Racing through the wadis and ergs of Morocco, the giant, cathedral-like sand dunes of Mauritania, the sprawling magic of the desert, may sound terribly glamorous -- and the drivers are exceptionally handsome in a rugged-race-car-driver kind of way -- but the glamour seems to wear off pretty quickly, even for them. Each night's bivouac is little more than a grimy campsite at the end of a small desert airstrip where the support planes and trucks lie in wait with food, fuel and water. There's precious little sleep for the weary, especially when there's another day of racing ahead.

"As soon as you get into the bivouac, you've got to feed yourself, and then as soon as you've eaten you start studying the next day's route," says Paul Krause, 33, this year's sole American motorcyclist. (Riding a KTM, he placed 14th overall.) "Just when you're ready to go to sleep, the crews are working on the bikes. You wouldn't believe the racket those trucks make. And don't get me started about the joys of truck showers."

For other drivers, however, lousy campsites are the least of their problems. The high drop-out rate of this year's race attests to the toll desert sandstorms inflict on man and machine, and much worse can lie in store. This year, a Spanish motorcyclist was helicoptered to Dakar in a coma after a crash; a Belgian team was fired on by Tuareg rebels in Mali (the rebels also kidnapped a Tatra, but later released its occupants); one vehicle was hit by rebels with rocket-propelled grenades; and two racers had to go to a hospital after colliding with a Mauritanian car -- whose five occupants died at the scene. Indeed, in all but four of its 20 years, the Dakar has been marred by death and accident. To the French, it's all part of the race. The ghost of Thierry Sabine still haunts the Dakar years after his helicopter crash.

But that's not what the drivers mention when asked why they take part in the rally. They talk about the sheer pleasure -- and challenge -- of driving through some of the most beautiful and desolate terrain on earth. And when they've finally gotten to Lac Rose and passed before the silly viewing stand in Dakar's central Place de L'Independence, they're just happy it's over. Happy, but exhausted. By the time the prizes have been given out that evening at the Hotel N'gor Diarama at the outskirts of the city -- a ceremony replete with cheesy Senegalese army buglers, a squadron of African drummers and fireworks that might make war look tame -- they're too pooped to party. The groupies from Paris may be looking to score, but the racers have had about as much action as they can handle. Besides, it's Ramadan, and most of Dakar is already asleep.