RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s first winner Yazheed Al-Rajhi will try to defend his Dakar Rally title when the two-week event starts in the desert kingdom on Saturday, with Toyota’s 2025 runner-up Henk Lategan predicting the closest battle yet.
The annual endurance challenge, run over 13 stages and some 8,000km entirely in Saudi Arabia for the seventh year in a row, kicks off with a short prologue around Yanbu on the Red Sea coast before a 305km special stage on Sunday.
Drivers must negotiate terrain including towering sand dunes, canyons and vast desert expanses with stage six the longest stretch at 920km.
Toyota have won three of the last four Dakars in the top T1+ car category, last year with Al-Rajhi in the customer Overdrive team, but face a tough challenge from Ford and Dacia’s array of champions in what is also the first round of the World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC) season.
Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah, a five-times Dakar winner with three different manufacturers, is with nine-times world rally champion Sebastien Loeb, Brazil’s W2RC champion Lucas Moraes and Spaniard Cristina Gutierrez in the Dacia Sandriders team.
