Triumph at this year’s Dakar Rally for Nasser Al Attiyah and Sam Sunderland

Nasser Al Attiyah will become one of the great legends of the Dakar Rally, because at the finish of this year’s race in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, he was the winner for the fourth time in his career and for the second time in the factory Toyota Gazzo race after 2019.

The 51-year-old driver from Qatar, who was also victorious in 2011 with the VW Touareg and 2016 with the Mini All4 Racing, both of which had just come close to victory in the two previous years, dominated this year’s race. With that he equalized the four victories of Ari Watanen and is only behind Stefan Pereransel, who could show 8 car victories (and a further 6 motorcycle victories).

The Dakar Rally took the first step towards electric drive this year with the RS Q e-tron, which is powered exclusively by electric motors and has a gasoline engine only for charging the battery.

Despite their youth, the German cars showed they had the speed, winning five special stages out of twelve of the race – more than any other manufacturer (Toyota had four and BRX / Prodrive had three) – including today’s (14/1) last one with Stefan Petrancell.

Audi was never in the battle for victory, however, as the disastrous first day for it and all three drivers were out of action, with separate issues: Carlos Sainth lost three hours looking for a time control point, Petrancell gave up (before returning the next day ) with a broken rear axle and suspension, and Matthias Ekstrom also lost a lot of time with navigation problems.

It was immediately clear that Al Attiyah would fight for victory with the Toyota Hilux T1 + with Sebastian Leb, who was quite competitive with the BRX team’s buggy built by Prodrive. The Qatar rider won two qualifiers in the first week but it was the first one that victory gave him.

On the way to Hale, his co-driver Mathieu Bommel found a crucial checkpoint of time that most other drivers lost and took a clear lead at the top of the standings. Leb was close to him and seemed able to threaten him, but a broken axle on the 3rd special stage and a navigation error on the 5th cost him a lot and left him almost 50 minutes behind Al Attiyah.

So in the second week the Frenchman was only hoping for a Hilux T1 + mechanical problem or a misdirection from Bommel to add his first Dakar win to his 9 WRC World Championships – on his 6th attempt in the last seven years.

Nothing of the first two happened as Al Atiya-Bomel, with exemplary perfection at the helm, kept a half-hour security gap to the end for the first time since moving to the “neighborhood” of Al Atiya, in. to win Saudi Arabia.

The Arab country is the home of former WRC driver Yazid Al Razi, who, with the Overdrive team and also with the Toyota Hilux T1 +, was the first individual winner to climb onto the podium in front of Leb’s teammates in Prodrive, Orlando, Teranova.

The battle for victory on motorcycles was anti-diametrical: multifaceted and unpredictable to the end. Sam Sunderland was responsible for the entire race until, with four days to go, he was five minutes behind the new leader at the time, Antiren van Beveren of Yamaha.

KTM’s Matthias Walkner stayed in the battle for victory when Gas Gas’s Daniel Saunders retired the easy route after a crash, while Honda’s Pablo Quintanilla and Joan Barreda Bort competed last week.

Van Beveren stayed firmly in the top three, taking his first win and Yamaha first in modern times, and in Wednesday’s 10th special he took the lead after Sunderland’s troubles.

On Thursday (January 13th), however, the Frenchman lost a very critical intermediate point and fell twice, with the disadvantage of being placed on the grid, causing him to lose 20 minutes and all hopes for victory. Sunderland returned to the top 7 ahead of Quintanilla and seemed shocking today.

And indeed: Quintanilla won the qualification, but the Briton only lost 3:25 minutes to the Chileans and thus took his second victory after the 2:17 in South America. In fact, it was the first from GasGas as well as the first from the KTM group (to which GasGas belongs) in the Arab country and interrupted the series of two victories for Honda.

2018 winner Walkner with KTM stayed in 3rd place, while Van Beveren and Bort – two of the riders who don’t take victory while they deserve it – closed the top 5 by 18 and 25 minutes respectively.

Vangelis Bersis and Fotis Koutsoumpos – the first Greek crew to take part in the Dakar Rally, which was their main objective – made it to the finish. Both in terms of driving and navigation, they managed the most inhospitable and difficult race in the world.

With a few small problems with the 1999 Mitsubishi Pajero that they solved on the road, as well as with several cracks, they started on the 50th today.