Saudi hero Al-Rajhi faces tough challenge in defence of Dakar Rally title

Saudi Arabia’s first winner Yazheed Al-Rajhi will try to defend his Dakar Rally title when the two-week event starts in the desert kingdom on Saturday, with Toyota’s 2025 runner-up South African Henk Lategan predicting the closest battle yet.

The annual endurance challenge, run over 13 stages and some 8,000km entirely in Saudi Arabia for the seventh year in a row, kicks off with a short prologue around Yanbu on the Red Sea coast before a 305km special stage on Sunday.

Drivers must negotiate terrain including towering sand dunes, canyons and vast desert expanses with stage six the longest stretch at 920km.

Toyota have won three of the last four Dakars in the top T1+ car category, last year with Al-Rajhi in the customer Overdrive team, but face a tough challenge from Ford and Dacia’s array of champions in what is also the first round of the World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC) season.

Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah, a five-time Dakar winner with three different manufacturers, is with nine-time world rally champion Sebastien Loeb, Brazil’s W2RC champion Lucas Moraes and Spaniard Cristina Gutierrez in the Dacia Sandriders team.

Loeb, whose world rally title record was equalled by fellow Frenchman Sebastien Ogier last season, is chasing his first Dakar win at the 10th attempt and this time has Al-Attiyah’s former co-driver Edouard Boulanger alongside.

Spain’s four-time winner Carlos Sainz, 63, and compatriot Nani Roma, a winner on two wheels and four, are driving Ford Raptors along with former German Touring Cars (DTM) champion Mattias Ekstroem.

French veteran Stephane Peterhansel, the 60-year-old winner of a record 14 Dakars on two wheels and four, returns with debutants Defender in the Stock production category.

“I think there’s some very, very strong teams and everybody’s starting to get their cars settled now. A lot of the teams are getting to the end of the development cycle of some of the cars,” Lategan told the www.dakar.comwebsite.

“The rules are written quite well, so I think this is probably the closest field of cars you’ll ever see in the Dakar. Also, one of the biggest fields you’ll ever see, so definitely there’s massive competition.

“There’s a lot of guys that can win and can fight for the podium. So, I’m expecting a really good battle.”

The Dakar always claims some big names early on and Al-Rajhi may want to show patience at the start after breaking two vertebrae last April in an incident that kept him out of competition until September.

“Our target is to win again, that’s most important. We’ll see how it is but sure the speed is there,” he said.

In the motorcycle category, Red Bull KTM rider Daniel Sanders will seek to become the first Australian to win back-to-back titles.

In a field of more than 100 bikes, Spaniard Tosha Schareina – last year’s runner-up – could still be Sanders’ biggest rival while two-times winner Ricky Brabec of the US is also back on a Honda.

The Dakar began in 1978 as a race from Paris across the Sahara to the Senegalese capital but switched to South America in 2009 for security reasons. It moved to Saudi Arabia in 2020.