Two days and a smidge over 600 miles later, the Dakar Rally caravan will have finally conquered the 48-hour chrono, the second stage of the 2025 edition.
At least, that’s the hope. For not every car will be lucky enough to make it back to Bisha on Monday evening.
Introduced last year, the 48-hour chrono is where the endurance – both physical and mechanical – of the crews is tested to the absolute limit. It also gives them a taste of the Dakars of old: the sense of adventure, rediscovering nature and battling the conditions alone.
When the clock strikes 4.30pm, crews need to head to one of six designated bivouacs, where they will camp overnight, enjoy the company of their fellow competitors and live off limited military rations before setting off again at 7am the following day.
Quintero is a big fan of the chrono stage
“It’s a really fun stage,” explained Toyota’s Seth Quintero, who won the opening stage on Saturday. “It’s about 1000km this year and we’re going to take off as normal, but there are checkpoints throughout the whole entire thing.
“So, let’s say the cut-off time is at 6pm, and I get past checkpoint three at 5.59pm, I could either [sacrifice] the minute and go to sleep or I could keep going and make the next checkpoint. Each category has different times for their checkpoints.
“I’m going to try and get as far as I can and get to the final checkpoint to make my second day easier, but there is a strategy to that; some guys will take a five-minute penalty instead of being tired and risking it. It’s a two-day race, we’ll have no assistance, sleeping in the desert and bringing our own food, so we’ll see what happens.”
Each crew will be supplied a basic military ration pack before the start of the stage, which includes a bag of muesli, a crumble, a tin of soup to share between two, an energy bar and a mix of hot drinks.
It may not sound like much, but as Dacia’s Nasser Al-Attiyah explains, the camaraderie shared among competitors is the true spirit of the Dakar.
“It will really be fantastic; we have experienced it already last year but to share the bivouac in the desert, around the fire, we make our dinner together and everything, is amazing,” Al-Attiyah said.
“We are tired, we have to check everything ourselves, we have no mechanics, and we have to prepare everything without assistance, and then we sleep until the next day. Then we just need to finish the stage without any problems and come back.”
The unpredictability is something the crews love; the teams back at base in Bisha a little less so.
“With the 48-hour stage so early in the event and also with it not being in the dunes, there’s that little bit of an unknown,” Matthew Wilson, team principal of M-Sport Ford, added.
The 'chrono' stage brings crews together as they set up camp without their mechanics
“There is an optional mid-stage service [to change tires] which is allowed so we will have a team going out to that, just in case, but the rest of the team will stay at the bivouac and try to follow as best you can.”
How teams approach the stage has varied significantly, and it all started during Saturday’s opening test of the event, with some crews – Dacia’s Sébastien Loeb and Al-Attiyah – electing to deliberately lose time in order to start further back on the road.
Others, like stage winner Seth Quintero from Toyota went for the opposing strategy, even if the Californian admits he ‘messed up’ by ending up the fastest car on the first loop around Bisha.
“I kind of messed up today, I won the stage, so I am starting up front tomorrow so I kind of blew that one!” Quintero told DirtFish.
“I went faster than I thought I was and I kind of didn’t mean to end up where I did so I will be aiming to go as fast as I can tomorrow.
“The 48-hour chrono is different to last year, which was in the dunes, and it was harder for those opening the road. I was fourth on the road last year, and the guys could catch because there were no rocks or dust.”
Ordinarily, Quintero would be left kicking himself slightly harder than he was following stage one but, as Wilson told DirtFish, the different terrain in this year’s 48-hour stage could produce an entirely different set of outcomes.
Quintero will be the first driver into the chrono stage on Sunday
“Last year, in the dunes, people first on the road lost a lot of time,” Wilson said. “The discussion has been ‘will it be as bad as that because it’s not the same terrain?’, but for sure, nobody really wanted to be first on the road. I have to say, where we ended up, was pretty much our plan.
“Maybe Carlos would have liked to have been one or two places further back, 10th would have maybe been ideal. But, then on the other hand, he’s probably going to be seventh or eighth on the road and he’s got nine minutes on Loeb, so it’s a balancing act.”
A balancing act it certainly is. M-Sport appears to be in the best of both worlds: it’s not opening the road, but they are close enough to the front and seemingly far enough away at the same time.
One driver keen to avoid a repeat of last year’s chrono stage is Al-Attiyah and his strategy of stopping near the end of stage one to ensure a lowly starting position for Sunday is one based on a rough ride in 2024.
“Everyone has been trying to manage, not to win the stage and to open [the road],” said Al-Attiyah.
“Last year, I won the stage before and I opened the 48-hour, and I felt really uneasy in the stage. To open alone, there is no line [from the bikes] and you lose a lot of time.
“So, we decided with Séb to be altogether all the way in the stage, and we ended up losing only 10 minutes behind the first place. Tomorrow we can win a lot of time if nothing goes wrong.”
The last point is pertinent, and Overdrive Racing’s Yazeed Al Rajhi knows what happens when things go wrong on the chrono. He was leading the event before a big crash forced him out of the rally.
While the carrot of big time gains dangles tantalizingly over the noses of the crews, they also know that only those who make it to the end of the stage can keep the fight alive.
