Bahrain Raid Xtreme BRX make steady start to Dakar

Partnered by Fabian Lurquin in his BRX Prodrive Hunter, Loeb recorded the third fast- est time on the day as Swe- den’s Mattias Ekström in an Audi set the early pace ahead of American Seth Quintero’s Toyota.

Nine-time world rally champi- on Loeb is pursuing a first Dakar victory for BRX, and for himself,secutive stage wins in Saudi 12 months ago on his way to a sec- ond successive Dakar runner-up finish.

The traditional Prologue is an appetiser for the much longer, demanding desert stages to fol- low over the next two weeks in a route of nearly 8,000 km, and it took the cars across rocks and sand into the canyons around AlUla, where navigation skills were put to the test.

While the stage timings willings, Loeb and the other top 10 finishers were later allowed to pick their starting positions for today, when the rally starts in earnest with a 414km special stage from AlUla to Al Hena- kiyah.

Defending champion and five-time winner Nasser Al At- tiyah, driving one of five other Prodrive Hunters in the event, finished the stage in 12th spot following a small navigational error.

Breakthrough

Loeb is determined to give the BRX Prodrive Hunter a break- through victory on the team’s fourth Dakar, and he was happy with today’s outcome, knowing he could face another huge bat- tle with Al Attiyah as the rally progresses.

“It was a clean stage, with no mistakes for us,” he said at the finish. “We tried to push to have a good position and it was a good stage for us.

It was not so easy. The navigation was quite diffi- cult and for sure it was not an easy start.

“I was a little bit nervous this morning, as always, but once we were in the car it all went well.” Traversing the kingdom from northwest to southeast and con- cluding at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast on January 19, the fifth Dakar Rally in Saudi promises to be a rigorous test of both hu- man endurance and technical engineering.

Once again, the Empty Quarter in the south will provide a dramatic chapter, as the cars take on the dunes that overall cover an area the size of France.

A new 48-hour Chrono stage at the midway point spans 600km in the dunes over two days, allowing service only by the drivers and rally truck crews at the overnight bivouac.