The Dakar 2025 competitors all agreed to target stages offering separate routes between cars and motorcycles as a key factor in this 47th edition. But no one expected that this innovation would cause such a mess during the 7th stage, this Sunday, January 12!
What happened?
During the 418 km special around Ad Duwadimi (Saudi Arabia), the trap occurred at km 157. The place was not spectacular, nor out of the ordinary compared to the thousands of kilometers to be covered over two weeks. Édouard Boulanger, the co-driver of Nasser Al-Attiyah (Dacia), is one of the first to tackle this passage.
“There was an error in the noteexplains the Frenchman. We really didn’t understand where the error could be. So, we went back 3 times, 4 times to the previous waypoint to restart our navigation, to understand where we were going wrong. And then, at one point, there were 12 cars we were looking for, so we said to ourselves: ”well maybe it’s not us who are in the wrong, there might be a serious worry !” “
By going back and forth, Al-Attiyah-Boulanger takes a lead. Apparently, that
