Dakar ’26 makes a yoyo look static.
After Toyota’s strong showing on stage four, Ford bounced back on stage five with six Raptors devouring the leaderboard’s top seven.
Mitch Guthrie/Kellon Walch became the first double stage winner after teammates Nani Roma/Alex Haro – who set the fastest time on the day – were penalized at the finish, dropping them to second place with the Czech privateers Martin Prokop/Viktor Chytka again excelling with their third podium of the race.
Guthrie, Carlos Sainz and Mattias Ekstrom made the early running chased hard by Seth Quintero, Guy Botterill and Joao Ferreira in a trio of Toyota Hiluxes.
By 100 km, Sainz and Ekstrom had faded somewhat and climbing into the top ten for the first time was Denis Krotov/Konstantin Zhiltsov, having set off from the marathon bivouac in a lowly 61st. Just over the halfway mark, the current W2RC champion Lucas Moraes/Dennis Zenz briefly split the two leading Fords but by km 237, Krotov had vaulted into third and Moraes was down to fourth.
With mileage running out, Roma made a big push and took the lead from Guthrie by four seconds, but his speeding penalty denied him his winner’s medal.
Moraes duly brought his Dacia Sandrider home in fourth place, just over five minutes ahead of Krotov, while the fierce Ford fight behind him was settled – by three seconds – in Ekstrom’s favour after Sainz received a one-minute speeding penalty.
The leading Toyota on Thursday belonged to Ferriera in his Gazoo Racing SA (Toyota has dropped “Toyota” from their global team’s name) who ended eighth, just eight seconds ahead of Simon Vitse/Max Delfino in their Optimus, their second top ten finish of the race and the leading rear-wheel drive car.
Botterill and co-driver Oriol Mena rounded out the top ten in their Gazoo Racing SA Hilux.
In the overall standings, for the first time this year, the top three remained unchanged. Henk Lategan and Brett Cummings enjoying a lead of 3’17” over Nasser Al-Attiyah and Fabien Lurquin, after 20½ hours of racing.
Lategan had a few navigational challenges on the second part of the marathon stage when he opened the road without bike tracks to follow. It was the trickiest task of the week for the South African, who ended the stage in 17th position.
“It was really, really, really difficult, one of the most difficult stages I’ve had to open. There were no bike tracks, and a lot of the tracks were really, really small tracks. The rain washed a lot of them away. I think the last two days you didn’t really want to open but Brett did a great job to get us here. We opened almost the whole day before Nasser overtook us for 200 metres at the end but then wrong slotted allowing us to pass again. It was relatively clean the whole day right until the end when Nasser overtook us. We were sitting in his dust and hit a massive ditch. I hurt myself a little bit, but the car is ok. We will check if everything is ok. For the car to make it through two days of marathon is actually an amazing job by the team seeing that this car was tested for the first time three months ago,” said the rally leader.
Al-Attiyah was philosophical about his stage; “It was not an easy stage. From the beginning, we tried to manage without any mistakes or punctures. I think we did a good job. Henk Lategan did a really good run and we just stayed behind him; we didn’t really need to pass because it was so risky and the navigation was not really easy. The marathon day is finished and we are quite happy. I don’t know if we have lost time but if it’s around ten minutes, then no problem”.
Luciano Benevides took the RallyGP win ahead of Chilean Ignacio Cornejo by 3’51’’ and Australian Daniel Sanders, who finished 5’50’’ behind and returned to the top of the overall rankings. Bradley Cox finished at the foot of the podium (7’22’’ behind) but achieved Sherco’s best result this week. He was followed by the leading Hondas ridden by Tosha Schareina (in 5th place, 9’13’’ behind) and Ricky Brabec (in 6th place, 9’16’’ behind), both of whom opened the way on the special.
Image credits: A.S.O, Red Bull Content Pool, Gazoo Racing W2RC and SA
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