THE SONS OF HASSELHOFF, GEOFF AND MARK, slipped their newly minted driver's licenses into their wallets, donned custom-printed t-shirts displaying the album covers of the beloved Knight Rider/pop singer, hopped into their tiny 1986 Volkswagen Golf 1.6 CL, and headed south out of Reading, a commuter suburb west of London.

Down in the English Channel port of Poole, meanwhile, the Conedodgers, a team consisting of brewpub designer Declan Hicks and marine mechanic Ed Parke, were playing Tetris with 12 cases of Carlsberg beer, concealing the suds beneath a plywood pantry they'd crammed into their 1992 Volvo Estate wagon. In London, Benja Hedley and Denis Meehan, the Badger Racing boys, hitched the shabby camper they'd purchased on eBay behind their 1984 4x4 Mitsubishi Montero Magnum, then gave each other ceremonial Mohawks before motoring out of town. And on the other side of the city, firefighters were shutting down a BP station where the gas tank of a little red 1991 VW Polo—driven by Team SloMoShun's Emma Barber and packed to the gills with camping gear, empty fuel cans, and plastic toys—was spurting unleaded all over the concrete.

Like hydrocarbon-fueled lemmings, they, along with 33 other teams from all reaches of the United Kingdom, were rushing headlong toward ferry crossings to France. Once on the other side, they were counting on their exquisitely crappy cars, many pulled from junk heaps or taken off blocks, to carry them to the southern tip of Spain, over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and across the roadless sands of the Sahara. It was the first day of the Plymouth–Dakar Challenge, and, with 4,500 miles and at least three weeks of travel ahead, the shit parade was under way.