The 2025 World Rally-Raid Championship resumes in just over a week for the third round of the season, the inaugural South African Safari Rally (May 18-24) based around the iconic Sun City resort in the foothills of the Pilanesberg National Park.
For some, the five-day rally is a critical crossroads in the W2RC title fight, with Dacia Sandriders’ Nasser Al-Attiyah keen to extend his points lead as he goes in search of a fifth crown, while Toyota aims to return to winning ways on what is effectively home soil given that much of the development and testing takes place in South Africa and Namibia.
Others, such as M-Sport Ford, are adopting a different approach to the W2RC. By rotating its driver roster of Carlos Sainz, Nani Roma, Mattias Ekström and Mitch Guthrie, it is openly sacrificing any hopes of winning the drivers’ title, but all because it has a different kind of victory in its wider plans: the Dakar Rally.
Prioritising one event over the championship is a unique approach, but not without its logic.
“When Ford took on wanting to go to Dakar originally, the interest purely was just on Dakar with the aim of winning it and that remains the ultimate goal,” M-Sport’s rally raid team principal Matthew Wilson tells DirtFish.
“That’s what we have been tasked with effectively, but what was quickly found out from our point of view was that in order to compete against [Overdrive Racing’s] Yazeed [Al Rajhi], and [Sébastien] Loeb and Nasser, doing just one or two rallies a year is not enough.
“So, the W2RC is obviously a great championship and it’s what everyone else does and for us, it’s a way of keeping our drivers sharp and actually testing our car in rally conditions rather than just private testing.”
Soft launched in 2023 using a Ford Ranger in conjunction with South African squad Neil Woolridge Motorsport, M-Sport made its first foray into rally raid in that year’s Baja Aragón, with a future custom-built T1 Ultimate project [based on the Raptor model] being developed concurrently.
Designed from a blank sheet of paper, the Raptor T1+ has undergone a substantial testing regime and showed promise on its competitive debut in the Hungarian Baja last summer, with Roma taking victory.
That promise continued into this January’s Dakar, where Ekström and co-driver Emil Bergkvist claimed a superb podium finish while Guthrie and Kellon Walch finished fifth.
More testing in competitive conditions, Wilson says, is what is ultimately going to develop the Raptor into a Dakar-winning machine.
Ekström gave Ford and M-Sport a Dakar podium this year, but a win is the goal
“That was a big part of it; of course, when you enter a championship, you always want to win it and do well, but it’s very clear from our side that we are using the W2RC to try and win the Dakar and hence why we’re rotating the drivers around,” Wilson explains.
“We had Mitch and Mattias in Abu Dhabi, we’re going to have different drivers in South Africa, and we’ll probably have different ones in Portugal, so we’re using it to keep sharp and as a tool to eventually win the Dakar.”
It’s no secret that the Dakar is the jewel-in-the-crown event of the W2RC – much like the 24 Hours of Le Mans is within the World Endurance Championship.
“Obviously the championship as a whole is brewing; if you look at the numbers from when it first started to where it is now, it’s definitely growing. But Dakar is the standout event that everyone wants to win – it’s the Le Mans of the W2RC,” Wilson adds.
“If you ask a manufacturer if they want to win Le Mans or if they want to win the World Endurance Championship, the answer will be Le Mans. And it’s the same with the Dakar; it’s a way for us to get more opportunities to get more experience in order to try and win the big one.”
The W2RC is merely an opportunity rather than a target, says Wilson
It’s an approach M-Sport is well used to, having previously run Bentley’s factory GT3 operation in Europe.
“We’ve seen it ourselves in the past when we’ve been involved in the GT program, we always wanted to win the Spa 24 Hours for example more than the GT World Challenge title,” explains Wilson, who was also team principal of that project.
“The manufacturers all want the jewel-in-the-crown. And the great thing about the [World Rally-Raid] championship is that we know that we’ve got four great drivers that we can be competitive with in all of the events and scoring manufacturer points.
“Obviously, it doesn’t help the drivers score points in their championship but as a brand, it helps us. But we have to keep telling ourselves that the end goal is that we want to win the Dakar.”
Time will tell if M-Sport’s against the grain approach will pay off. Following disappointing individual Dakars back in January, both Sainz (crash) and Roma (engine dramas) will be back in action in South Africa, keen to get their seasons back on track.
