It is this Friday January 3 that the Dakar 2025 is launched. This 47th edition begins with a prologue around the town of Bisha. We tell you everything you need to know before the serious things begin.
D-Day for the Dakar 2025. The most famous rally raid in the world begins this Friday in the southwest of Saudi Arabia. To Bisha more precisely. A city of 200,000 inhabitants where participants have been meeting since Wednesday January 1 after collecting their vehicles in Jeddah. The competitors will also stay a good while in Bisha and its surroundings. They will not leave this city definitively until Tuesday morning. After the famous 48 hour test.
A 79 km warm-up
This Friday, the participants of the Dakar 2025 will have to cover 79 km with only 29 km of special. At the end of this prologue, the first 10 in the ranking of each category will be able to choose their starting position. Which will be important for Saturday's stage. It is not necessarily interesting to head into the desert and open the way for the other competitors. Please note, however, that the prologue is not counted in the general ranking. But this will be the first opportunity for Sébastien Loeb, Nasser Al-Attiyah, Carlos Sainz and Guillaume de Mévius to measure themselves.
The prologue route in video
How to follow the prologue of the Dakar 2025 on television?
This year, as in 2024, it is the L'Équipe channel which owns the broadcast rights for the event. The channel available free of charge on TNT will offer several programs during the day. But the most interesting is the scheduled meeting every day at 11:50 a.m. live from Saudi Arabia. This will be an opportunity to know the rankings and have the first reactions of the drivers upon arrival with Luc Alphand on site and Daniel Elena, former co-driver of Sébastien Loeb, in the studio in Paris.
However, for this prologue, the live appointment is scheduled from 8:30 a.m. This will be the opportunity to have the first impressions of Sébastien Loeb, Carlos Sainz and Nasser Al-Attiyah on this Dakar 2025.
