For the uninitiated, the Dakar Rally seems the stuff of science fiction. It is an impossible idea for a race, carried out on the grandest possible scale: trucks, cars, motorcycles and mammoth support vehicles battle for weeks on end, across all manner of terrain, in a contest that extends for thousands of miles.

From a European starting point, racers battle to a finish line in the capital of Senegal, Dakar, for which the event is named. The race is, at turns, spectacularly dangerous, stunningly beautiful and impossibly grueling. Given the nature of the contest, it is all the more unusual that one manufacturer and one vehicle should come to dominate it.

The Mitsubishi Montero has been singularly effective in the contest. Mitsubishi's quest for improving the performance and durability of the Montero receives its ultimate test every January. But with 12 wins overall, and seven consecutive wins since 2001, the Dakar is definitive proof that Mitsubishi builds some of the world's toughest high-performance vehicles.