N°216 Car TOYOTA GAZOO RACING

SETH QUINTERO

(usa) 1.84m / 66kg

Hobbies

Lots of stuff! Riding motorcycles, fishing, hunting, snowbarding, BMX, golf…

Sponsors

Red Bull, Toyota Gazoo Racing, BFGoodrich, KMC, Sparco, Stilo

2023: 2nd T3 (2 stage wins)
2022: 16th T3 (12 stage wins)
2021: 18th T3 (6 stage wins)

2023: Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge (1st T3) / Sonora Rally (10th T3) / Desafio Ruta 40 (11th T3) / Rallye du Maroc (2nd T3). W2RC: 1st T3
2022: Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge (3rd T3) / Rallye du Maroc (1st T3) / Andalucia Rally (2nd T3). W2RC: 2nd T3
2021: Andalucia Rally (3rd T3) / Rallye du Maroc (10th T3)
2020: Andalucia Rally (5th T3)
2019: Best in the Desert (1st): MINT 400 (1st), Vegas to Reno (1st), UTV World Championship (1st), Parker 250 (1st), Silver State 300 (1st)
2018: MINT 400 (2nd), Vegas to Reno (2nd)
2015: UTV World Championship (1st, youth class), World Off Road Championship Series [WORCS] (1st, youth class)
2014: UTV World Championship (1st, youth class)

Interview

“I want to go out and try to be the best every single day”

Since turning up to his first Dakar as a fresh-faced teenager in 2021, Seth Quintero has taken the world of rally-raid by storm. One of the most talented drivers of the emerging generation, the 21-year-old began racing lightweight prototypes at the age of 10 and bagged his first championship win at 11, which quickly put him on Red Bull’s radar. With their support, he climbed the ranks and continued to break records for fun, becoming the youngest driver to win a host of American offroad events and conquering the Best in the Desert series in 2019. At just 18, he made his Dakar debut alongside German co-driver Dennis Zenz. Seth and Dennis have done three seasons together in the T3 class, enjoying all manner of highs and lows. They’ve won stages galore at the Dakar, setting a new all-time record for a single edition with a mind-boggling 12 in 2022. But for a long time, overall success eluded them, with gearbox issues putting them out of contention at Dakar 2021, and broken differentials ruining their hopes on an otherwise flawless run in 2022. An errant wheel on Stage 4 of Dakar 2023 also cost them precious time, but Seth and Dennis did recover to finish second behind Austin Jones. Slowly but surely, they have started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. They took their first overall win at the Rallye du Maroc 2022, then managed to snatch victory in the 2023 World Rally-Raid Championship, despite issues in Mexico and Argentina. The dust had barely settled on that achievement when the big announcement was made: Seth and Dennis would be joining the Toyota Gazoo Racing team for Dakar 2024, stepping up into the Ultimate class. Remarkable as it sounds, a 21-year-old from San Marcos has thus been handed the keys to the Toyota GR DKR Hilux T1+, the formidable machine Nasser Al Attiyah drove to Dakar victory in 2022 and 2023. Such a move will clearly thrust the young Red Bull duo into the spotlight as they battle with rally-raid legends such as Stephane Peterhansel, Carlos Sainz, Sebastien Loeb and of course Al Attiyah himself. Seth already had a chance to test himself against the Qatari at the Dubai International Baja, showing impressive pace but suffering an unfortunate rear differential problem on the final stage. Despite his inexperience at this level, the young American will be carrying weighty expectations on his shoulders at Dakar 2024.


S.Q.: “I guess I'm feeling a lot of things. I”m excited, first of all. It's also nerve-wracking, because it's my first year in T1 and I haven't really done many miles in the car. It has won many times, many rallies, been driven by the best in the world. And now I'm driving it. I know I'm expected to win. I expect that from myself, but I need time to learn. We saw in Dubai that the speed is there, but now we just have to do it for 14 days straight! Definitely feeling a little bit anxious. You want to beat everyone else, but to be the best in the world every time you step in a car is not the easiest job. I know there's people expecting me to fail, others expecting me to succeed. There are a lot of eyes watching and questioning. I would rather go out there and try to win every single day. I have so much to prove, and I don't want to seem like I'm cruising. Dennis and I proved you can work your way through the ranks to the highest level of offroad racing. We had an amazing run in the T3s but also one of the unluckiest. Finally, we saw it fall our way for once. It was nice to end that way and step away as world champions. I crossed the finish line knowing we were champions, and I was just kind of numb and raw. I think I went to bed at about 8pm that night, and got my best night's sleep ever! I'm sure I'll regret that later, not celebrating. But when you work so hard for something and it finally happens, you don't need to exploit it, because you're so proud of yourself."

D.Z.: “When I was seven I did karting, because my parents were involved in motorsport. I did that until I was 13, then jumped into the co-driver's seat, and found that I really enjoyed it and wanted to improve. I was able to start racing officially at 16. I did that for many years, until I got a call from Red Bull, asking if I wanted to jump into rally-raid. Two days later I was at the airport in France meeting Seth on the way to the Andalucia Rally. We had no clue about the car, the navigation, the different systems. Everything was new for us. I'll never forget the first day of Dakar 2021, when I'd never seen a proper navigation roadbook. We were both kind of clueless, but somehow we made it to the finish of the first day, and then we ended up winning six stages. It's only been three years since we started this journey and we've had lots of experiences, good and bad. Winning the championship was unexpected because we didn't have the best year, to be honest. It was up and down at every race, but winning the title was a kind of payoff for struggling with bad luck for the past three years.
Jumping into the big car is a dream come true. I'll never forget being 10 years old and watching the WRC in Germany, with guys like Carlos Sainz. I was a little kid praying I'd get their autographs, and now I'm going to be fighting on the same level as them in the W2RC. It's crazy, you can't imagine. We want to prove that we're fast, that we belong in the sport, but it's not the expectation to go to Dakar and kick everybody's ass! If we stay clean, we can get a good result, but we're not speaking about fighting for the win just yet. So not too much pressure on our shoulders please!"

Vehicle

TOYOTA GAZOO RACING

TOYOTA GR DKR HILUX
TOYOTA GAZOO RACING

  • TOYOTA
  • GR DKR HILUX
  • Toyota Gazoo Racing
  • Toyota Gazoo Racing
  • T1+: Prototype Cross-Country Cars 4x4

Ranking 2024

All news of S. Quintero

Summary - 19/01 17:53 [GMT +3]

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Summary - 14/01 18:32 [GMT +3]

Three is the magic number for Cornejo and Loeb

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Leaving aside the lousy navigators out there who manage to stretch the course like a rubber band, covering more than 850 km in a Dakar stage is something that happens once in a blue moon. It has only happened once in Saudi Arabia, in today's return to competition on the road from Riyadh to Al Duwadimi, clocking in at a whopping 874 km, following the prescribed route...

Summary - 13/01 19:03 [GMT +3]

After the Empty Quarter

After six stages and a total of eight days of racing, including the prologue in AlUla, the 46th edition of the Dakar has been a roller-coaster of breakthrough performances, vindications, debacles, plot twists, comebacks and surprises on the tracks and dunes of Saudi Arabia. The culmination of the first week, the brand-new 48H Chrono concept, scattered drivers and co-drivers...

Summary - 09/01 18:24 [GMT +3]

Cornejo like a boss, Loeb back to winning ways

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The thermometer only read five degrees in the early morning on leaving the tents at the bivouac in Al Salamiya to head towards the city of Al Hofuf, next to one of the country’s biggest oases, home to three million date palms. In between the two, the total distance to be covered measured almost 700 km, but the riders, drivers and crews “only” did...

Newsflashes - 09/01 17:09 [GMT +3] - Car

Quintero exits the special

Following mechanical problems at the start of the special, Seth Quintero had to wait for his assistance team for more than 2 hours 30 minutes before having to resign himself to leaving the route of the special by road, a crushing blow for the rookie in the Ultimate category.

Summary - 07/01 18:20 [GMT +3]

"Peter" hits the big five-oooooooooh!

FOCUS

The road to Al Duwadimi, which contained the first dune fields of this edition, set the riders and crews on a course to the geographical heart of Saudi Arabia. The dunes were not tough or numerous enough to shake up the standings; instead, the entrants had to put their navigational flair to good use to get out of one maze after another, in addition to marshalling...

Newsflashes - 07/01 12:16 [GMT +3] - Car

Another rookie at the front

After Guillaume de Mevius, today is Seth Quintero's turn to go toe to toe with the seasoned veterans of the Ultimate class. Yesterday, we were treated to a duel between De Mevius and Sainz. Today, Quintero is squaring off with another Audi driver, Stéphane Peterhansel. He leads "Peter" by 10 seconds at km 167. Yazeed Al Rajhi is chugging along at...

Summary - 05/01 17:40 [GMT +3]

Schareina and Ekström: a day for sprinters

FOCUS
The name may seem misleading, with a prologue that turned out to have an extraordinary dimension, over a distance of 27 kilometres that was a condensed version, albeit a very accessible one, of the whole range of terrains encountered on the Dakar. The region of AlUla is ideal for such a sample, with sandy portions that were followed by rocky zones and even several...

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