World Rally-Raid Championship newcomer Dacia has been riding the crest of a wave since its competitive debut in Morocco last season.
Two wins from three events, a couple of stage wins on the Dakar Rally and the early lead in the 2025 W2RC standings for Nasser Al-Attiyah is a pretty decent start in anyone’s book.
All smooth sailing on that side of the workshop, but the same cannot be said for the other star name in the Sandriders squad, Sébastien Loeb.
While Al-Attiyah is seeking a fifth world title this season, Loeb is simply looking to reach the finish having been forced out each time on FIA safety grounds. For its part, Dacia tried to appeal Loeb’s enforced Dakar withdrawal – without success – and maintains a different stance to the FIA in terms of the car’s safety.
“The car from Dakar, we’re still using for testing, we haven’t repaired it, so I think that is testament to the fact that we think it is still safe,” Dacia’s technical director Philip Dunabin told DirtFish.
“The FIA might think they are taking a hard line and uncompromising position on this, and that position is to a certain extent understandable. The roll cage and the car are at their safest when they are in their original specification and anything that is outside of the original condition, they can’t make a comment on.
“So they won’t, on their side, assume any risk. We made a request that would change the homologation proposal, but they didn’t buy that idea.”
Back in January, following Loeb’s stage three incident, the FIA’s manager for cross-country and regional rallies Jérôme Roussel defended the hard and fast ruling.
“It’s very simple; as soon as the roll cage is damaged, as soon as the tube is bent, the roll cage is not considered OK. And as you cannot realistically repair the roll cage on site, then the car cannot continue. That’s as simple as this.
“The rule is really hard, I know this. And at the end, Dacia didn’t want to retire the car, so we had to put the case to the stewards who decided to disqualify the car.”
For Dacia, it is a hard pill to swallow and one where it will undoubtedly agree to disagree with the authorities.
It’s a nuanced debate. The roll cage bend experienced in Loeb’s Sandrider does not ordinarily amount to severe damage but the level of deformation versus the originally homologated chassis provides enough of a risk that further damage could have been done to the cage in the event of another crash.
Could Dacia have done anything different to prevent this?
“Obviously, if you don’t roll the car, you don’t have any issues,” quipped Dunabin. “But the reality is that these incidents did very little damage to the car but the way that the FIA applies the rules means that as soon as you have any small deformation of the roll cage, you can’t continue.
“In terms of fixing damage during a rally, that’s not really feasible for us to do, even if we worked throughout the night, it would be impossible for us to complete. When you design a roll cage, you design it in whatever shape you want, so the tubes that were bent, we could have designed them to be bent in the first place if we felt like it.
“And the reality of it is, the amount of bending in the tube – and the one that was concerned was the one that goes over the top of the door – was around 8mm of bend and the second one was around 5mm, and if we do the calculations then the roll cage is still very largely able to pass the FIA homologation requirement.
“So we have a situation where the FIA says that our roll cage is not the same as it was when it was homologated because it is deformed, therefore you can’t continue. And on the other side you have our argument that a small amount of deformation doesn’t make a roll cage unsafe and that it doesn’t satisfy the roll cage safety specifications.
“Changing the roll cage design wouldn’t change the situation in any case but whatever you land on, you’ll be in a position where you can’t remove the roll cage during an event. So redesigning the car wouldn’t change the car; the best thing to avoid any issues is simply to not roll the car in the first place.”
Dacia and Loeb were not the only crews to fall foul of the FIA ruling. M-Sport Ford’s Carlos Sainz was also forced out of the Dakar, a day before Loeb, while around 10 other teams equally had to retire prematurely.
Despite this setback, Dunabin is more than satisfied at the strong start for its Sandrider machine, which underwent an extensive testing regime prior to its maiden outing in Morocco at the back end of the 2024 W2RC season, which it won.
“Essentially, from a vehicle performance point of view, we’ve been able to demonstrate a very competitive level from the car compared to the others,” said Dunabin.
“Two wins out of three events is not a bad record at all, and the third one we were in a position to win it if we hadn’t had a couple of time consuming but relatively minor issues with the car. On the one hand, we’ve had excellent results and on the other side, we’ve had two retirements for Sébastien in Dakar and Abu Dhabi which were a bit of a disappointment.
“The car tends to be at its best when we’re in areas that require a good level of maneuverability [due to the short wheelbase of the Sandrider]. There was a lot of work done on the compactness of the car compared to the other brands and we spent a lot of time maximizing the visibility out of the windscreen and the side windows.
“And where the visibility is limited, you are better off with our car than some others. The drivers are more or less very happy with how much visibility they have at the moment which makes it easier for them to navigate these sorts of terrains.
“Of course, they want more visibility than what they’ve got but there’s only so much more we can do. There is a blade at the hood that they want to remove; the Dacia designers don’t want to do that, and the reason there is the blade there is because we have lowered the bonnet line to lower than where it would have been.”
There may be some degree of comfort for Loeb and his navigator Fabian Lurquin. While their two crashes came on desert and dune terrain, South Africa’s maiden Safari Rally round should feature more WRC-like stages based on gravel.
Could this well be the turning point of Loeb’s W2RC campaign? We’ll find out from May 18.
