While Mãrtiņš Sesks and M-Sport missed out on a podium, and potentially a win, at Rally Saudi Arabia, there’s relief shared between both driver and team.
For Sesks that he proved his pace, and for team principal Richard Millener that the Ford Puma Rally1 has been shown to be competitive.
Sesks was forced out of the final round of 2025 with a mechanical issue that succeeded two punctures on the penultimate stage. He had been just two seconds shy of rally winner Thierry Neuville prior to that misfortune.
Over the course of the weekend Sesks won five stages – a tally only Hyundai’s Ott Tänak could match.
“I think there is some relief for me and Renārs that we have the pace, and that we can do things in the right way,” Sesks said. “I am happy with what we have shown together with the team after all the hard work that has been put in. It was a pleasure to be back.”
M-Sport didn’t achieve a podium for the first season since 2021, leaving Millener to admit Sesks’ exit was difficult to swallow.
“It’s a hard one to take,” Millener told DirtFish. “Personally, I’ve been there before a couple of times now. And it’s why I always say it’s so hard to win a rally.
“They did their very best to deliver what they could. It would have been a bit of a fairytale ending to get to the end. A win was always going to be difficult against someone like Thierry, but a podium I thought would be something that could be achievable. But yeah, the Saudi Arabian deserts had other ideas for us.”
Millener, however, wants to focus on the positives.
“It’s hard to do that right now,” he admitted. “Right now you just think about how close we were but it is what it is at the end of the day. We’ve just got to keep battling on, keep fighting.
“The car can be competitive. I read the comments, some of the comments for about 30 seconds before I get bored of them. There’s always someone saying, ‘oh it’s because of the road position’, or ‘you wait ’til we get to the next day’, or ‘you wait ’til you get to the third day’. But he was matching Thierry on the last stage there up until the puncture. So that’s just complete b******s really.
“The car is definitely capable when everything comes together and that’s no disrespect to the other two drivers at all either, because everyone’s on different strategies, different points in their careers. Some are more confident at the beginning, some want to take a more logical step forward, like there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
“Mãrtiņš got into the groove this weekend and as soon as you get to that point you feel super confident you can go super quick. But you know it was always… it’s always so hard to get to the very end, you know. We spoke to Gus [Greensmith] this morning, I wished it could have been two 10km stages, job done, but it was 65km and that 35km in the middle is always going to be hard. And it was.”
