New year brings new possibilities with two days to go

January 2 ^nd 2026 - 08:03 [GMT + 3]

  The Toyota Hiluxes belonging to some of the favourites to win the car race were one of the highlights of the technical and administrative scrutineering, which got under way with two days to go until the prologue kicks off the 48th edition of the Dakar. Among these favourites were the returning champion, Yazeed Al Rajhi, as well as his runner-up in 2025, Henk Lategan, and many representatives of the new generation of rally raids.

The bivouac in Yanbu also welcomed back Stéphane Peterhansel, poised to start his 36th Dakar on Saturday after skipping the previous edition. He will be spearheading a set of three Defender entries in the Stock class. Seeing Mathieu Baumel on the start list may have seemed a long shot following his serious crash in late January 2025, but he made it and will be navigating for Guillaume de Mévius in the Belgian's bid for glory.

Further afield, the young drivers in the Saudi Next Gen academy got off to a flying start. The race is also laying the groundwork for the future on the tech side of things, with Sven Quandt's team announcing its intention to enter a hydrogen-powered car being designed with Mike Horn's Inocel firm in 2027.

YAZEED AL RAJHI: "WE'RE READY TO FIGHT NOW"

The bivouac was crawling with Toyota Hiluxes decked out in different liveries on the first day of technical and administrative scrutineering. Yazeed Al Rajhi, who capped his eleventh Dakar appearance with a heroic home win in 2025, is the natural leader of the swarm. The Saudi champion saw his luck turn shortly after his crowning achievement, as a crash at the Baja Jordan left him with two broken vertebrae and hampered him for the rest of the season. Even so, he remains upbeat about his title defence prospects: "We're ready to fight now. Our goal is to win again. We've still got the pace." There is no shortage of challengers eager to topple him from the throne, including his first rival from last year, also driving a Hilux. Of course, Henk Lategan wants to improve on his second place, but he has both feet planted firmly on the ground, all too aware of how the Dakar can turn on a dime: "I think the competition's going to be quite close. I think this is probably the closest field of cars you'll ever see in the Dakar. There's a lot of guys that can win and fight for the podium." Toby Price, a two-time winner on two wheels (2016 and 2019), failed to reach the finish in his debut on four in 2025, but the Australian and his new navigator, Armand Monleón, are still aiming high: "I wanna win Dakar on four wheels", he warned. "It's gonna take a lot of work, but somewhere deep down something is telling me that I'm not quite finished with it yet."

JOÃO FERREIRA: "YOUNG DRIVERS ARE GETTING FASTER AND FASTER AND FASTER" The Toyota armada stands out for the depth of its roster and the average age of a college party. Seth Quintero, 23, and Saood Variawa, 20, already netted a couple of stage wins for the Japanese maker last season. They will be gunning for a strong overall finish this time round, as will João Ferreira, 26, who is delighted to have joined the cast of this "Toy" Story halfway through the season. "Before the race starts, everyone is a contender. Young drivers are getting faster and faster and faster. As we saw in Morocco, we were on the pace of the top guys, not just me." He is far from the only rising star with lofty overall ambitions. After taking the title in his Dakar SSV debut back in 2023 at the tender age of 19, Eryk Goczał is not ruling anything out in his first appearance in the premier class. The Pole also picked a T1+ Hilux for his return to the Dakar: "I do my best to improve with each passing race. Hopefully, the next few days will be no exception. I'm going to keep pushing the envelope and putting the pedal to the metal. I'd say that's my strong suit!" Blood is thicker than water, as they say, and the wunderkind will be counting on his father Marek and his uncle Michał (who also won SSV stages back in the day) in his bid for top honours.

STÉPHANE PETERHANSEL: "WE'LL BE FAR FROM THE PROTOTYPES"

For once, "Monsieur Dakar" is not in it to win it! It would not have been a stretch to assume that Stéphane Peterhansel, a fourteen-time winner of the Dakar (six times on two wheels and eight on four), would call it a day at the end of his adventure with the German manufacturer Audi. In the end, he decided to step back into the fray with a completely different project: breathing new life into the Stock class, reserved for slightly modified production vehicles three or four cuts below the cutting-edge models. "Prototypes can take an unbelievable amount of punishment", stresses the Dakar record holder. "You can blast over holes and grooves that would mess up the driver's back and the car will just take it on the chin. Our car is much more brittle, so we need to take it easier and avoid pushing it too hard. These are the main two reasons we'll be far from the prototypes." While the Defender D7X-Rs will not make their presence felt at the top of the race, the British maker is targeting the Stock class title, hitherto the preserve of the Auto Body Toyota Land Cruisers, with twelve victories to their name. Supporting "Peter" in this quest are the Lithuanian Rokas Baciuška and the American Sara Price, who have already made their mark in the Challenger and SSV classes.

MATHIEU BAUMEL: "CRACKING THE TOP 5 WOULD BE A GREAT WAY TO GET BACK IN THE GAME"
Guillaume de Mévius is Mini X-raid's key asset. The Belgian was the first to place his trust in Mathieu Baumel, a four-time winner of the event as a navigator, after the Frenchman suffered a horrific crash a few days after they had completed the Dakar together. For now, the crew that stole the show with second place in 2024 have handily won the race against time to share a cockpit. In fact, the Franco-Belgian pairing have already contested two bajas as a warm-up. Mathieu Baumel is back in business with clear objectives: "They said I'd have to spend one or two years in physical rehab, but I got it out of the way in six months. Saying we want to win this would be empty bravado. Cracking the top 5 would be a great way to get back in the game. A more realistic proposition, which I hope we'll be able to achieve soon, is a stage win. It would be a personal victory for me, and we owe it to the team."

ORIGINAL BY MOTUL: A TRUE ADVENTURE BEYOND THE SPOTLIGHT
26 riders make up the Original by Motul field. The director of the Dakar, David Castera, a former rider himself, showed up to wish them a happy new year and deliver a special message: "You're in a class of your own because you go where almost no-one else dares to go, racing without support and relying on no-one but yourselves. You embody the concept of adventure in its truest sense. I would like you to know that the organisation massively respects what you do, going on an adventure beyond the spotlight." In addition to the regulars who have their sights set on the top spots of this race within a race, such as the Romanian Emanuel Gyenes (winner in 2020 and 2025), the Frenchman Benjamin Melot (twice second behind Gyenes) and the Spaniard Javi Vega (runner-up in 2023), there are ten rookies, making up over a third of the field. Seven are French, including Matthieu Jauffraud: "We're getting to know each other. We all began our selection pathways in 2023 or 2024, almost invariably as malles-moto in races such as the Rallye du Maroc, the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge or the South African Safari Rally. We've all made the same new year's resolution: standing on the podium on 17 January. I'm looking forward to the start. I left home on Sunday, 28 December and the race will get going on Saturday, nearly a week later".

SAUDI NEXT GEN, SEASON 2
The Dakar is an indomitable beast and the best one can hope for is to get acquainted with it and hang on for dear life. The Saudi Ministry of Sports and Motor Federation joined forces with the rally organiser to set up an academy and hone talents who can follow in the footsteps of drivers such as Yazeed Al Rajhi. Yesterday, it opened its doors to its second promotion. "We hope Saudi Arabia will be not just a place where people feel welcome, but also a place that nurtures drivers and fosters champions", as David Castera summed it up at the beginning of a press conference also involving the five drivers and navigators in Saudi Next Gen, who come from various backgrounds (karting, track racing, conventional rallies, off-road, etc.). One of them, the karting and autocross driver Abdulaziz Al Saud, broached the highlights of the accelerated learning programme: "This is a really important step in the path to the top level, and it goes beyond driving skills. You also need to understand preparation challenges and being in synch with your navigator. We're already getting an idea of how hard it'll be to reach the level of the Dakar in the future". The former rider and organiser Edo Mossi oversees their training and gauges their potential. The Italian has taken note of the potential of his disciples and is enthusiastic about their future prospects: "They really struggled with the tests of the first day. Yesterday, I was talking to absolute newbies who had barely even touched a road book before. Today, I've already noticed some progress and have students with a laser-like focus".

HYDROGEN ON THE HORIZON WITH DAKAR FUTURE

In the Dakar, the future is now. David Castera calls it "an open-air test bed where we take the mobility of tomorrow from paper to reality". The race organiser has thrown its weight behind this concept with Dakar Future, a multifaceted programme that has received the full-throated support of the manufacturers in the race, eager to win and push the technological envelope for the eventual benefit of their customers around the world. Tiphanie Isnard, team manager of the Dacia Sandriders, which fall under the umbrella of the Renault Group, had her engineers join forces with the Saudi business Aramco to develop a new fuel for their four vehicles: "We chose this biofuel after determining that it slashed our carbon footprint without sacrificing performance in the slightest". Toyota Gazoo Racing is also in the midst of a transition to greener fuels, as explained by the team Sporting Director of TGR W2RC, Jean-Marc Fortin: "Repsol and us have a common foe, carbon, so we've been working closely and running test after test after test to perfect the ideal biofuel for our Hiluxes". Meanwhile, the six motorbikes fielded by Arctic Leopard Galicia Team and Segway and the KH7-Ecovery truck will tackle the Mission 1000 challenge on the tracks and dunes of the Dakar. The Dakar Future has also made its presence felt in the bivouac, with the newest avatar of a project born in the heart of the race. Back in 2020, the adventurer Mike Horn entered the event alongside Cyril Despres in a car tasked with collecting useful data for designing a hydrogen fuel cell. Six years on, his business Inocel has developed Gen-Z 300, a hydrogen-powered mobile generator that already supplies electricity to part of the bivouac. Last but certainly not least, a major announcement was made at the press conference held in Yanbu today: Inocel and the X-raid outfit, led by Sven Quandt (who already brought Audi to Dakar glory with a hybrid vehicle driven by Carlos Sainz in 2024), will prepare a hydrogen-powered vehicle for the 2027 edition of the Dakar Future Mission 1000 challenge —the first of many breakthroughs to come.