After two days of documentation and scrutineering, Dakar 2026 kicked off with a short 22km prologue which will determine the who is in the draw for road order for Sunday’s first stage.
Mattias Ekstrom and Emil Bergkvist set the early running for Ford with a time of 10min 48.7 seconds, some eight seconds ahead of the American Ford duo of Mitch Kuthrie and Kellon Walsch.
The stage winner reported: “I had a very good prologue, it was much more difficult than I expected from navigation and stones and, for me, this was a small stage and Emil did a very good job and we had a clean stage, so if someone goes quicker now, I can only say well done because we cannot go quicker than this, that was [the] maximum for us. I like the car a lot. I think M-Sport and Ford have made a good evolution last year. Already, for the first shot, I think the car was good ,but now I feel for my liking of driving this is very good car, it is very agile and the suspension is also great, so I don’t have any excuses of the car or the team so it’s more up to me and Emil to drive as quick as we can, and that’s what we try and do.”
A short stage always produces close margins so it was no surprise that two other crews finished on the same second; Belgians Guillaume de Mevius/Mathieu Baumel (X-Raid Mini) and the leading Dacia Sandrider of five-time Dakar winner Nasser Al-Attiyah/Fabian Lurquin taking the third and fourth spots respectively.
Seth Quintero/Andre Short was the leading Toyota Gazoo Racing W2RC crew in fifth, closely followed by the defending Dakar champion Yazeed Al Rajhi and Timo Gottschalk in their Overdrive Racing Hilux.
Making their debut in the FIA T1+ Ultimate category was Eryk Goczal and Szymon Gospodarczyk in their Toyota Hilux taking a superb seventh ahead of Carlos Sainz Sr/Lucas Cruz in their Ford Raptor, who pipped Mathieu Serradori/Loic Minaudier in their factory Century Racing CR7.
Rounding out the top ten was the newly crowned SA Rally-Raid Champions Saood Variawa/Francois Cazalet in their Toyota Gazoo Racing SA Hilux.
One of the pre-rally favourites and last year’s Dakar runners-up, Henk Lategan and Brett Cummings, suffered a puncture and were classified 47th in their TGR W2RC Hilux.
“It was a bit of a disaster for us. In one of the sandy bits, we were in a rut and we hit a rock, got a puncture. It was not going down immediately. We thought maybe we got away with it, but in the end we didn’t. So yeah, really a bit disappointed. We wanted to have a good prologue to start off with, and this was a bit of a disaster. So yeah, now we go back to the pits and re-evaluate a little bit and see what we can do. Most probably we will be one of the first guys on the road tomorrow, if not opening. So tough start to the race for us,” said Lategan.
Sebastien Loeb and Edouard Boulanger caught Lategan and were stuck in his dust which relegated the nine-time WRC champion to 17th. The Frenchman wanted to be one of the fifteen drivers who get to pick their starting positions for stage one.
Edgar Canet picked up his maiden special on his very first RallyGP outing. According to the available records, this makes the 20-year-old Spaniard the youngest winner of a motorbike stage in the history of the Dakar. The KTM factory rider ended up three seconds ahead of his teammate Daniel Sanders and five seconds clear of their Honda rival Ricky Brabec
Sunday’s first stage takes 433 vehicles, including 72 FIA T1+ Ultimate machines on a 518 km loop from Yanbu and back to Yanbu, with 305km of timed racing.