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The question about the safety of this sport is easily answered - it was never safe.
This reminds me of the Senna situation, when the death of a backmarker would have changed nothing about the public's perception of racing but the death of a champion was immediately followed by an outcry of "stop the madness". Had only Perez died, noone would have questioned the Dakar as such.
Should the Dakar and similar races be abolished? - I don't know.
Restrictions: this is not F1 where you just add a few chicanes. This is much more complex. A limit on overall capacity will not slow them down, only make them more expensive. They'll probably recert to single cylinder machines - are they much slower? All the KTM works bikes (I don't know about the others) already road legal so another way of possibly restricting them is out.
And: you cannot physically prevent them from going faster than a mandated speed, you can only record their speed, and punish them later. Which may be too late. In general, I believe speed limits have no place in racing; not only are they difficult to police (speed traps in the desert??) but they are also a ludicrous notion in the racing context.
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