Nasser Al-Attiyah has secured a sixth Dakar victory aboard a Dacia Sandrider, resisting a rally-long challenge from the armada of Ford Raptors.
Al-Attiyah had already briefly taken the rally lead on stage two but a stage win on the sixth test established him as the driver to beat; only a navigational error on stage nine briefly cost him the top spot, which he quickly recovered.
Henk Lategan was Al-Attiyah’s closest rival on pace alone but his event unravelled on stage 11, when he had to stop for several hours to repair a broken wheel bearing on his new-for-2026 Toyota Hilux GR and fell from second to 23rd; he eventually recovered to 19th.
He’d already suffered power steering failure, several punctures and a crash that forced him to kick the windshield out of his Hilux earlier in the rally.
Of all Al-Attiyah's rivals, Lategan was consistently the fastest – but at the expense of running into more problems
“I don’t know what to say any more,” said an exasperated Lategan after stage 11. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong on this race. I have amazing teammates and a fantastic car, but no luck. Everything that has happened to me in my previous participations happened all at once in this edition. It’s unbelievable.”
Toyota’s other leading hope of victory, Seth Quintero, was out of the running to win early on: he won stage two, then ran out of tires due to punctures on stage three and lost over an hour.
Sébastien Loeb’s hopes of contending for victory were dented by a slow run through stage three – he’d backed off on the rough, rocky sections due to multiple punctures that left him with no spares – and then a power steering failure on stage nine. He finished the rally off the podium, 15m10s behind Dacia team-mate Al-Attiyah.
That left a quartet of the M-Sport-run Ford Raptors to fight Al-Attiyah for victory: four-time winner Carlos Sainz, two-time winner Nani Roma, Mattias Ekström and Mitch Guthrie all took turns fighting for the top spot during the rally.
The lead battle remained highly unpredictable until the penultimate stage, when Al-Attiyah delivered a hammer blow to Roma and his team-mates
Guthrie led briefly after stage three but ultimately lacked the pace to keep up with the frontrunners as the race wore on; Ekström was next to lead the Ford charge but got lost in the same place as Al-Attiyah on stage nine – in his case, the time loss was more significant and took him out of the lead battle entirely.
That immediately helped promote Roma and Sainz to a 1-2 formation on the same stage. But disaster struck Sainz: he got lost looking for a waypoint on stage 10 and also incurred a speeding penalty, which led to a combined time loss of half an hour.
Roma was left as Ford’s last hope to catch Al-Attiyah but an imperious performance on stage 12 by the Dacia driver almost doubled his lead to 16 minutes, ensuring he would have a comfortable lead gap for the short final stage on Saturday.
Al-Attiyah’s sixth victory means he remains second on the all-time list for wins in the car category, now only two behind Stéphane Peterhansel on eight. It was also a first Dakar win for Fabian Lurquin, who had taken over as Al-Attiyah’s navigator late last year after several seasons alongside Loeb.
Al-Attiyah's race was perfectly balanced: he lost less time than Loeb when suffering similar puncture problems on the rocks, and found his way again much sooner when both he and Ekström got lost trying to find a waypoint
Though Al-Attiyah held the top spot for much of the rally it was still a hard-fought victory: the lead gap only exceeded 10 minutes once all rally.
“We are very happy; maybe I am not in the emotions now but really it’s in my heart,” said Al-Attiyah at the finish.
Al-Attiyah has competed in 22 editions of the Dakar and is now 55 years old but at the finish made a bold target: he wants another three wins: “I still need to beat the record of Peterhansel in cars!”
Ford locked out the rest of the podium behind Al-Attiyah, with Roma leading Ekström home; Sainz completed in the top five in the third Raptor, 28m30s behind the leader.
Mathieu Serradori finished an impressive sixth overall for relative minnows Century, run by the SRT team he’s been affiliated with for almost a decade. He scored Century’s first ever Dakar stage in the latter half of the second marathon stage.
Lucas Moraes made it three Dacia Sandriders in the top 10; he went into the final stage with only 18 seconds to find on Serradori to nab sixth but instead lost over a minute to the lead Century, ending seventh.
Serradori's stage win with Century was the underdog story of the rally
Despite his inexperience in the Ultimate class relative to team-mates Lategan and Quintero, two-time bike class winner Toby Price finished as the top Toyota Hilux in eighth overall, leading home Quintero in ninth.
Guthrie was on course to round out the top 10 but picked up a penalty on the final stage, promoting Saood Variawa from Toyota’s South African works team into 10th at the very end of the rally.
Defender secured a 1-2 in the Stock class on its Dakar debut, with Rokas Baciuška ahead of Sara Price. Peterhansel had been recruited to spearhead Defender’s new foray and had been running second behind Baciuška until his alternator belt snapped on stage eight, costing him several hours.
Pau Navarro clinched the Challenger class win aboard his Taurus T3; Yasir Seaidan – driver for Al-Attiyah’s own outfit – had fought him for the lead early in the rally but suffered mechanical problems on stage six that cost him 48 minutes. His deficit to Navarro by the finish had been trimmed to only 24 minutes, with Seaman charging back to second place.
Bruce Heger secured a dominant SSV win in the Loeb co-owned Polaris factory team. Eight-time World Rallycross champion Johan Kristoffersson, who was one of Heger’s team-mates, finished eighth in SSV on his Dakar debut.
