Sébastien Loeb is the star and favorite of this Dakar 2025 in the car category. At the wheel of his Dacia Sandrider, the nine-time WRC world rally champion hopes to finally secure victory.
For the 9th time in his career, Sébastien Loeb will start the Dakar this Friday for the prologue in the company of Fabian Lurquin, his co-pilot. At the wheel of the Dacia Sandrider, the French driver hopes to achieve success for the first time in the premier rally-raid event. He has also made his experiences, sometimes unfortunate, on the Dakar one of his strengths for this 2025 edition:
“It will be a difficult Dakar and we may have to drive even more than usual with the head to be able to impose ourselves… We will see every day how the situation evolves. We realize that you have to combine several factors to win, so I hope our experience will be an asset. We have worked hard to prepare for this race and I can't wait for it to launch. We are ready to give everythingthe team too”.
A more “intellectual” approach is also what Nasser Al-Attiyah, teammate of Sébastien Loeb at Dacia, advocates:
“The course is particularly demanding this year… The first week promises to be crazy, so it will take an intelligent approach”.
Reliability, the key to the 2025 Dakar
We remember that in 2024, Sébastien Loeb and his teammate at Dacia, Nasser Al-Attiyah, were victims of the lack of reliability of their ProDrive car. And that cost them victory against a very consistent Carlos Sainz at the wheel of his Audi. For this 2025 edition, the Dacia teams took advantage of the Morocco rally to test the resistance of the car and its parts, as Philip Dulabin, the technical director of the Dacia Sandrider, explains:
“The double at the Morocco Rally showed the good performance of the Sandrider, but we placed the emphasis on reliability for the Dakar Rally… In Morocco, we had problems with the electronics controlling the cooling fans and we were able to delve deeper into this subject to put measures in place. We also have assessed the lifespan of each element to provide enough until the finish of the Dakar and optimize our chances of obtaining the best possible result”.
Photo credit: ASO/F.Gooden/DPPI & ASO/F.Le Floc'h/DPPI.
