AMBITIONS 2025

L.M.: “I’ve been dreaming of the Dakar ever since the first edition, more than 40 years ago. I was fortunate to develop professionally, so I could work on such a project, and I saw the day to do it with the Classic. So, it’s been four years that I really started to prepare for the Dakar, with our own car.

I’m also a fan of vintage cars and I wanted to be able to do what we want with our vehicle for the Dakar. It was already used for the Classic three years ago and we’ve prepared and tuned it again with Tecnosport.

We’ve always had this passion for off-road. Being in these great outdoors, improvising a bit with the driving and the navigating, we love it both Elena and I. There’s room for fantasy, for instinct and for the unexpected. That’s the huge difference with circuit races.

We’ve been having some results we didn’t expect for so we’ll see what we can do in the Dakar. Finishing in the top-20 would be a dream but I guess it’s going to be really difficult. As rookies, we’ll be happy to finish and I have to say we’re very upbeat, just ready to enjoy.”

E.B.: “Our first rally-raid was the Panda 4x4 in 2022 and Luciano told me: ‘My dream has been to do the Dakar since I was a kid’. So, we’ll do the Dakar. A few days after we returned home, he told me: ‘I bought a Nissan Terrano II to do the Dakar.’ And that’s how our project was born.

Luciano is always very organized, super focused since quite a while before the race starts. For me, it’s more like I get to focus 100% when the race happens. But anyway, the preparation for the Dakar has gotten us very busy and focused.

We don’t want to be presumptuous but we also don’t like to be unprepared. And the Dakar is a commitment, with time, with money, so it would be a shame to waste this opportunity and risk screwing up early and maybe stopping the race after a few days. We’re not sprinters, we’re about regularity. And coming from the world of Panda raids, we really have this focus of preserving the car, which is crucial in a race like the Dakar.”