Dacia has won the famed Dakar Rally for only the second time of asking, with the prototype-style racing car of driver Nasser Al-Attiyah and navigator Fabian Lurquin taking first place by a margin of ten minutes.
Where is the Dakar Rally held?
The Dakar Rally, originally known as the Paris-Dakar Rally when it was first established in 1979, no longer heads to Dakar in Senegal as there are too many safety issues on the classic route southwest from Paris and across Africa. These days, Dakar is a bit more contained and is held in Saudi Arabia, but it's still an intense challenge of navigation, performance, and reliability.
Is the Sandrider based on a production Dacia?
No, the Sandrider is a purpose-built racing car, which takes some of the styling of Dacia's Manifesto concept car and built in co-operation with legendary rallying squad Prodrive. Clearly, Dacia builds them tough, as after 7,976km of desert driving - with more than 4,800km of timed special stages - not only did the Sandrider team come first, but it also brought all of its cars home at the finish.
Sébastien Loeb and Édouard Boulanger returned to the final bivouac on the banks of the Red Sea in fourth position, as Lucas Moraes and Dennis Zenz completed their first Dakar Rally with the team in seventh place. Cristina Gutiérrez and Pablo Moreno took 11th overall, having started the final stage in 12th.
Who came second?
The much-fancied Ford Racing team, using specially designed versions of the F-150 Raptor pickup, finished in second and third places, respectively, crewed by Nani Roma and Alex Haro, and Mattias Ekstrom and Emil Bergkvist.
The Dacia victory marks a massive sixth win on the event for Al-Attiyah, who said: "To win this Dakar with our team, The Dacia Sandriders, is amazing. Really, I am so happy to win the Dakar six times in my career. Thanks to Fabian, I was so pleased to help him also, because he deserved to win the Dakar for the first time. The last stage was really very tricky because there are a lot of things in the mind. But we did a good job, we took it easy, let two case pass and followed all the way. I feel really great.”
Katrin Adt, Dacia CEO, said: "We did it! What an achievement, what an adventure, what a performance! Today is a historic moment and the proudest moment for the whole Dacia brand. It is the result of so much hard work by so many talented people, and it shows that The Dacia Sandrider, like our road cars, is reliable and robust. All the team members deserve this result, and they should be so incredibly proud for what they have done, achieving victory so early on in Dacia's Dakar journey.”