The 2025 Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia has kicked off with a bang, featuring a grueling 48-hour stage that eliminated several top drivers, including Carlos Sainz Sr. and Sebastien Loeb. Organizers raised the stakes with a longer distance, split routes, and a focus on attrition.
Anyone who assumed the Dakar Rally had become too easy since leaving its spiritual home in Africa was taken aback by the first few days of the 2025 event in Saudi Arabia. The strategic decision to place the 48-hour stage near the very beginning caused havoc, taking out several heavyweights including four-time champion Carlos Sainz Sr (Ford) and WRC legend Sebastien Loeb (Dacia) - who exited in the next stage after the Chrono.
Dakar has always been ruthless to its competitors but the start of its 47th edition has been particularly brutal. Most of the drivers this year had already experienced a two-day, 48-hour stage on its debut in 2024, but organiser ASO had raised the stakes this time around. Firstly, the competitive distance was almost doubled from 549km to nearly a thousand kilometres, meaning it was worth more than the last four stages combined. Then, the route for bikes and cars was split, leaving drivers to navigate on their own without the help of any tracks laid out by their two-wheel counterparts. And finally, many drivers had sacrificed the opening stage in order to gain a more favourable road position, obliging them to push even harder to make up the lost ground. All those factors combined to create mayhem, whittling the field down and leaving several pre-race favourites out of the running, With stages four and five also run to a marathon format, the entire opening week of Dakar could be full of attrition. If it wasn’t for a WRC-style rule introduced in 2022 that allowed drivers retiring from a stage to rejoin the rally the following day, even more contenders would have been forced out by now. ASO can consider itself fortunate that a resurgent Mini is in the hunt for victory for the first time since losing Sainz and Stephane Peterhansel at the end of 202
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