Dacia’s preparations for a first assault on the Dakar got off to a perfect start on Rally Morocco, with Nasser Al-Attiyah and Sébastien Loeb sealing a one-two finish on the Sandrider’s debut on Friday afternoon.
Al-Attiyah won the shortened opening stage of five of Monday and never looked back, the Qatari star not encountering a single mechanical fault or puncture on his way to victory.
That success also ensured Al-Attiyah wrapped up a third consecutive World Rally-Raid Championship title, with wins at the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge and Rally Raid Portugal aboard a Prodrive Hunter making up for his non-finish on this year’s Dakar.
Al-Attiyah and navigator Edouard Boulanger clinched the W2RC Ultimate title despite their DNF on the Dakar, which awards more points than the remaining rounds
Loeb’s Moroccan outing got off to a rocky start. He crashed into a ditch on the prologue and had to start 121st on the road on the opening day, where he then broke a steering arm and lost 12 minutes.
By Wednesday, Loeb had scored his first stage win aboard the Dacia and he did it again on Friday, a drive that allowed him to leap from fourth to second on the final day.
X-Raid’s new Mini JCW Rally 3.0i, like the Dacia Sandrider, also made its competitive debut in Morocco. Both Guillaume de Mevius and Guerlain Chicherit had defected from Overdrive mid-season to spearhead the team’s line-up in Morocco and into next year’s Dakar; they started strongly, with Chicherit fastest on the prologue and the pair going into the final day running running second and third.
Disaster struck for X-Raid on the 170-mile Mengoub test. Chicherit was first to fall, suffering a technical issue early on Friday’s final section and retiring from the final podium place. De Mevius, meanwhile, had been making inroads on Al-Attiyah, taking two minutes out of the rally leader by the second waypoint, but then stopped mid-stage with a broken engine belt; team-mate João Ferreira was quickly on the scene to aid the repair efforts.
De Mevius, who finished second on this year's Dakar with an Overdrive-run Toyota Hilux, was in the mix for victory on his X-Raid debut until midway through the final stage
While De Mevius ceded second position to Loeb, he was able to hold onto third, heading Yazeed Al-Rajhi home by 10 minutes.
Factory Toyota pairing Seth Quintero and Lucas Moraes were second and fourth-fastest on the final stage but their hopes of fighting for the podium had ended earlier in the week. Quintero lost 18 minutes on the opening day but battled back to fifth, while a throttle problem cost Moraes over an hour on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after taking a stage win.
Carlos Sainz was unable to repeat Thursday’s stage-winning heroics and was fourth-fastest on Friday. The two-time World Rally Champion had failed to start stage two with a technical problem, ending Ford’s main hope of a maiden W2RC podium early on. His team-mate Mattias Ekström, another recruit from the now-defunct Audi Dakar program, retired before the first waypoint of the final stage.
Rokas Baciuška wrapped up the Challenger class title aboard his Can-Am Maverick T3 but the rally itself was dominated by the Goczał clan and its army of Taurus T3 Maxes.
A family one-two-three in Challenger was on the cards until stage four: Michał Goczał accidentally set off his fire extinguisher before Thursday’s stage, leading to an automatic DNS. Michał’s nephew Eryk won the race, followed by the youngster’s father Marek 10 minutes behind.
