In Saudi Arabia there are countless dunes, but just one may have cemented the result of the 2026 Dakar Rally in the car category. Carlos Sainz was not angry after losing the race for which he prepares all year and many other drivers. Yes I was disappointed, of course. “I’m sorry,” he repeated over and over again to the members of the Ford team as soon as he got out of the car at Bisha’s bivouac. The 63-year-old driver from Madrid acknowledged, resigned, that his aspirations for the fifth Touareg ran aground in some unidentified place on that damned sand hill located at kilometer 186 of a 421-mile special between the shelter camp for the second marathon stage, without assistance, and the town of Bisha.
It will probably be one of the most difficult notes in the road book of the 5,000 kilometers against the stopwatch that the competitors will accumulate at the finish line in Yanbu next Saturday. One of the hidden points that all browsers fear. Badly placed and dangerous, according to many, when found on a dune with poor visibility. Everyone agreed that it was one of the most complicated specials they can remember in the history of the rally, a kind of gymkhana of constant zigzags between mountains of soft sand.
Roma, which still maintains hope, lost at the same point and lost almost 13 minutes to the new leader, the Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah. , which are not few. In addition, he pointed out a possible annotation failure on the part of the organization, although after several detours he was able to validate the note. Àlex Haro, his co-pilot, indicated that the note of disagreement was borderline correct. By just deviating three degrees from the course along four kilometers between dunes, it would disappear. The confusion was that it seemed to point to a point within the track, and not at the top of the sand mountain, where it really was.
“It was a very complicated point, we have been going around and we have seen many similar cars, but we have not been able to validate it. We have tried up and down, forward and backward. So in the end we have decided to continue,” Sainz lamented. “I don’t think it was a problem in the road book. When it’s a point in the dunes you have to maintain the ‘cap’ (direction), and we followed the lines of the other cars, and when we got to the point it was clear that whoever opened had made a mistake,” he added after learning his teammate’s opinion.
Ford considered claiming the return of lost time from the FIA, more to look for a miracle than out of conviction. They detected two errors to cling to: an incorrect heading and a distance of more than 400 meters between notes at a crossroads, something that the regulations do not allow on paper. Against them are the many participants who did get the note right, whether with more or less luck.
Lucas Cruz, Sainz’s co-pilot, recognized his mistake after passing just 40 meters from the 300-meter detection radius of the waypoints (waypoint in English rally-raid slang) and then deviating to the wrong side to try to find it. Stress and confusion did the rest: when they had been walking around for 20 minutes, they decided to skip the note, knowing that they would receive an additional 15 minutes of punishment. Now they are 40 minutes behind the leader in sixth place overall.
did not fall into the trap of the rivals’ ruts and ensured that he passed that point without any problem. “Today has been a very difficult stage of navigation. At the point that Carlos and Nani got lost, the secret was not to follow the marks of the rest in the sand. We had to follow the direction indicated in the route book and catch the point, do our job,” agreed the Qatari, who has everything in his sights to build his sixth Touareg in the second year of the Dacia project, a brand of the Renault group. The leader of the race has a 12-minute margin over South African Henk Lategan (Toyota) and almost 13 over Roma, who closes the podium.
Carlos Sainz, who in other defeats did not hesitate to show his anger, limited himself on this occasion to intoning a kind of mea culpa: “We already knew that it was going to be a very important stage. Last year, in the 48-hour stage [muy similar a una etapa maratón]starting eighth, soon we were opening the track and that made our rally end there.” History has repeated itself this year, where the two marathons especially punished Sainz. In the first week, during the fourth stage, he missed almost half an hour due to various mechanical problems, and in the second week he lost 45 minutes in stage 10 after having started the day just one minute behind the leader. That’s the Dakar.
In the motorcycle category, a hard fall by the current champion Daniel Sanders rules him out of the victory, which will now be played by the American from Honda Ricky Brabec, the new leader, and the Argentine from KTM Luciano Benavides, separated by less than a minute in the general classification. The Australian will try to continue the rally with a broken left collarbone and sternum.
