CRUSHING BLOW OF THE DAY: PRESSURE ON MÉVIUS-BAUMEL
Guillaume de Mévius and Mathieu Baumel finished their first joint venture in 23rd place in 2025 behind the wheel of an X-raid Mini. For their return after the accident that led to the latter having a leg amputated, the four-time winner of the Dakar as a navigator set himself three goals: “The first was to take starter’s orders and that’s done. The following would be a stage victory, as soon as possible, and a Top 5 finish at the end of the rally”.
Before yesterday, fortune seemed to be favouring the man whose inner force demands the respect of the entire bivouac. The Mévius-Baumel duo won stage 1 in Yanbu, but today in AlUla they were much less fortunate. The Belgian has drawn a premature line through their third objective:
“Unfortunately, I think we messed up our Dakar today. We got punctures and made several mistakes. First of all, we had to wait for Lionel Baud who gave us a spare wheel, but he had a puncture further on so we had to give him it back. We drove how we could and in the end it was Maria [Gameiro, the 3rd Mini in the race] who gave us her wheel to complete the last fifteen kilometres. It’s not been an easy day to digest. It’s very frustrating”.
