Yanbu – AlUla; 400km, liaison 104km
Write off Toyota at your peril. After stage one of the Dakar Rally, where only two Toyota’s made it into the top ten, and five Fords filled the leaderboard, the Japanese ‘empire’ struck back on stage two, taking the top five positions on the stage leaderboard and ending with seven trucks in the top ten.
It is the first time since 2007 that a manufacturer – Volkswagen – has claimed the top five positions in a stage.
Seth Quintero and Andrew Short completed the 400km stage with a time of 3hr 57’16”, giving the new-for ’26 Toyota Hilux its maiden Dakar stage victory.
Henk Lategan and Brett Cummings brought their Toyota Gazoo Racing W2RC machine home in second position, having started 17th this morning.
The day started with Saood Variawa and Francois Cazalet seizing the lead in their Toyota Gazoo Racing South Africa entry and held it across the first quarter of the stage before Quintero demoted the 20-year-old TGR driver to second place. Variawa hung on gamely just 71 seconds off the lead at the halfway mark, but fell into the clutches of last year’s winner Yazeed Al Rajhi.
Al Rajhi ended third, 14 seconds behind Lategan, with Toby Price/Armand Monleon and Joao Ferreira/Filipe Palmeiro making it five Toyotas in the top five.
The standout drive on stage two belonged to Simon Viste and co-driver Max Delfino in the two-wheel drive Optimus-Chevvy who came home in sixth position overall, the best result of his career, and the leading non-Toyota!
Sebastien Loeb came home in seventh on the day, pipping his Dacia Sandriders teammate Nasser Al-Attiyah by 24 seconds.
Al-Attiyah, though, takes the overall lead by seven seconds from Quintero. Guillaume de Mévius (+1’09”), South African Henk Lategan (+1’28”), and Frenchman Sébastien Loeb (+1’57”), with Joao Ferreira in 6th (+2’01”) and Toby Price in 7th (+2’42”), the top 7 are separated by less than three minutes…
Michal Goczal/Diego Ortega (Toyota Hilux) came home in ninth with Variawa rounding out the top 10.
Interestingly, only two of stage one’s top ten finished in the top 10 today.
Daniel Sanders took control of the race with victory after relieving rookie teammate Edgar Canet of the overall lead. Honda riders, Ricky Brabec, Tosha Schareina, Skyer Howes and Martim Ventura followed the KTM duo home.
“After yesterday, we fixed our heads, rested and felt much better. The navigation was really tricky in some places but we fixed a couple of mistakes quickly and didn’t lose too much time, but it was a good rhythm and we didn’t push or do anything crazy. I caught Edgar after around one hundred kilometres. It was so hard to catch him and pass him before. After that, there was some really tricky stuff and he just sat behind and watched, followed and learned. I’m sure he had some fun back there in the dust. He was there to fix a couple of mistakes and it was good fun riding with him,” said the RallyGP leader.
Discussion about this post