Ford has surged into the lead of the Dakar in 1-2-3-4-5 formation, while two key victory contenders ran into significant trouble on the rally’s third stage.
Road order once again played a big part in the end result, with the front-running armada of Ford Raptors all starting between 13th and 23rd on the road.
Mitch Guthrie charged ahead to win stage three and take the lead ahead of privateer runner Martin Prokop, with the remaining works Raptors of Mattias Ekström, Carlos Sainz and Nani Roma rounding out the top five. The quintet are separated by only four minutes overall.
Guillaume de Mévius and his navigator Mathieu Baumel – who has returned to the Dakar 11 months after a life-changing accident – won the opening stage of the rally but lost over two hours and dropped to 60th place, having to stop and wait for team-mate assistance multiple times due to punctures.
“I think we lost the Dakar today,” said de Mévius at the finish line. “We had a puncture and made several mistakes. First we had to wait for Lionel [Baud], who gave us a wheel, but he also got a puncture, so we gave it back to him. We carried on as best we could and in the end Maria [Gameiro] gave us a wheel to cover the final kilometres. It’s a tough day to digest.”
Seth Quintero had moved to second place, only seven seconds off the lead, after winning stage two. But stage three was his undoing as he dropped over an hour. Though set to suffer as first car on the road regardless, Quintero ran out of spare tires and was given a wheel by Ford privateer Denis Krotov to complete the stage.
Punctures were a recurring theme of the rocky third test: Sébastien Loeb suffered two, which cost him almost half an hour and dropped him to 12th place overall.
“It’s not suited to our cars,” said Dacia driver Loeb. “We’re driving at about 20% just to avoid punctures and we still had them. I had two punctures after 100 kilometers, whereas yesterday I had none. Today I started in the same mindset, careful about everything…puncture anyway! You don’t see it coming.
“With two flat tires and 300 kilometers to go, I had no spares left so we drove the whole stage at a crawling pace. I’m just happy to be at the finish because at some point I didn’t think we would make it.”
It was a similar story for team-mate Nasser Al-Attiyah, who had been leading the rally after stage two; he also sustained two punctures and fell to 10th overall, 11m39s from rally leader Guthrie.
Dacia still has three cars in the top 10 thanks to reigning World Rally-Raid champion Lucas Moraes in sixth and Cristina Gutiérrez in seventh, with Mathieu Serradori’s Century and Saood Variawa’s Toyota Hilux in eighth and ninth place.
Loeb, like team-mate Al-Attiyah, was beset by punctures
Last year’s Dakar winner, Yazeed Al-Rajhi, meanwhile is down in 19th overall and nearly 30 minutes off the lead after missing a waypoint on stage two, earning himself a 16-minute penalty.
Puck Klaassen became the fifth woman in Dakar history to win a stage, topping the Challenger class aboard a G Rally Team-run KTM X-Bow.
Klaassen, competing on the Dakar for the third time after her 19th-placed finish last year, beat the rest of the field by over eight minutes and moved into second in class, 2m53s behind Challenger leader and Yasir Seaidan’s Taurus Evo Max.
She joins an esteemed list of women to have won Dakar stages: Jutta Kleinshmidt won 10 between 1997 and 2005, Gutierrez scored one scratch time apiece in 2023 and 2024, Sara Price won three last year, as well as one so far this year, and Dania Akeel also won a stage in the Challenger class last year.
Rokas Baciuška, who has previously scored class podiums in the Dakar in both SSV and Challenger, leads the way in the newly-created Stock class, almost half an hour ahead of Roland Basso’s Toyota and nearly an hour up on his Defender team-mate Stéphane Peterhansel.
