Even today you'll see dangerous conditions in long distance desert racing due to unstructured roads and inadequate crowd barrierrs (for those that travel out to the dune whoops to see things go bad:
( Finke, not the Paris-Dakar )
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-0eTjCfVXs
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJfuZdymPes