2023 Dakar Rally: Nasser Al-Attiyah completes Drive for Five in T1

As the defending Dakar Rally winner, Nasser Al-Attiyah was the man to beat on four wheels entering the 2023 edition. Unfortunately for the field, nobody could beat the man.

Al-Attiyah won his fifth Dakar Rally in dominating fashion with over an hour and twenty minutes on the field, scoring a trio of stage wins in the second, fifth, and sixth. Despite finishing outside the top ten in the rain-shortened Stage #3, he assumed the overall lead after Carlos Sainz was struck by a mechanical issue, and never relinquished it from there. The margin was so side, maxing out at 1:27:10 after Stage #12, that Al-Attiyah could afford to lay off the throttle as he did in Stage #7 where he was fourteenth.

Previous victories came in 2011, 2015, and 2019 followed by his back-to-back wins. He first won with Toyota Gazoo Racing in 2019.

“This is an amazing feeling,” said Al-Attiyah. “I have to thank so many people, starting with every member of our team. It was a tough two weeks, but to be able to come back and defend our title is fantastic. I’m really proud of our GR DKR Hilux T1+, and to win the race three times with Toyota Gazoo Racing is truly something special.”

Sébastien Loeb finished runner-up for the second straight year, marking the first time that back-to-back Dakar Rallies had the same finishers in the top two. Although Loeb officially placed 1:20:49 behind Al-Attiyah in the overall, he was the star of the Rally’s second half as he won a record six consecutive stages from #8 through #13. Loeb ended the race with seven total wins, the most since Sainz in 2011.

However, Loeb fell out of overall contention early when tyre punctures and mechanical problems knocked him out in the first three legs. His fellow Prodrive Hunters Guerlain Chicherit, Vaidotas Žala, and Bahrain Raid Xtreme partner Orlando Terranova experienced the same troubles throughout, with Žala and Terranova subsequently exiting the Rally. Despite the setbacks, Chicherit won the final leg to sneak into tenth in the final classification, and Prodrive took nine of fourteen stages total.

Despite not winning, Loeb leads the World Rally-Raid Championship thanks to his seven stage victories.

“I’m really proud for the job on the car that was really strong,” said Loeb. “We had hardly any problems with the car itself, just the punctures in the first week that were really bad luck as we were trying to take it easy, but those flats lost us more than two hours so to finish second here today is very good considering where we were. We had a very good second part of the rally, we enjoyed it, we had fun in the car as it was so good so it was just brilliant as we could still fight for something and come all the way back to second place. We’ve taken good points for the Championship, taken a new Dakar record with six consecutive stage wins so I’m still happy. For sure I would prefer to win because now it is my third second place but not everybody finishes on this kind of rally.”

True to Loeb’s closing remark, the 2023 Rally had a notoriously high attrition rate as drivers retired at least once or had one too many off-days that allowed Al-Attiyah to pull ahead. This was especially the case for Sainz and his Team Audi Sport allies: after Sainz won Stage #1, he and team-mate Stéphane Peterhansel crashed out five legs later. Sainz suffered another wreck in Stage #9, ending his race for good as he had fractured his T5 and T6 vertebrae. Prologue winner Mattias Ekström was the lone Audi to finish, but his string of exits at the midway point relegated him outside the top ten. Consequently, Ekström stood alone in the T1.U subcategory for upgraded electric vehicles like the Audi RS Q e-tron E2, which controversially received a performance boost only for Al-Attiyah—who was openly critical of the action—to win anyway.

Century Racing brought ten of their CR6 cars to Dakar, but many ended on their roofs like Tim and Tom Coronel, Laia Sanz (in the Astara Concept 01 variant), and Brian Baragwanath. The lattermost drove the upgraded CR6-T as did Mathieu Serradori, who suffered an engine failure on the final stage which prevented him from sealing the T1.2 subcategory win. Michel Kremer‘s CR6 burst into flames after just one stage. Despite their troubles, all but Kremer was able to make the finish.

In addition to Al-Attiyah’s overall, the Toyota Hilux T1+ continued to establish itself as one of the top vehicles in rally raid. Lucas Moraes finished on the podium in his first career Dakar ahead of Al-Attiyah’s Toyota Gazoo Racing allies Giniel de Villiers and Henk Lategan. Moraes is the highest finishing newcomer in the Cars overall since Juha Kankkunen won the 1988 edition. Another Hilux driver Yazeed Al-Rajhi won Stage #7 but it was sandwiched between mechanical problems. His Overdrive Racing colleague Erik van Loon, who was runner-up to Al-Attiyah in Stage #2, bowed out of his final Dakar Rally following a roll and hospitalisation five days later.

Ford Raptor RS racer Martin Prokop was the highest finishing entry not in a Hilux or Hunter in sixth. Prokop arrived at Dakar with an upgraded Raptor nicknamed “Shrek” that débuted at the Rallye du Maroc in October.

Daniel Schröder won the T1.1 subclass for modified T1 4×4 vehicles, finishing twenty-eighth in his Nissan Navara VK50. T1.2, for 4×2 cars, was claimed by the SMG HW2021 of Wei Han, who was eighth overall for the highest-ever Car finish for a Chinese racer.

Forty-four T1 cars finished the race of sixty-four who started.

T1 overall top ten

Finish	Number	Driver	Co-Driver	Team	Time	Margin
1	200	Nasser Al-Attiyah	Mathieu Baumel	Toyota Gazoo Racing	45:03:15	Leader
2	201	Sébastien Loeb	Fabian Lurquin	Bahrain Raid Xtreme	46:24:04	+ 1:20:49
3	230	Lucas Moraes	Timo Gottschalk	Overdrive Racing	46:41:46	+ 1:38:31
4	205	Giniel de Villiers*	Dennis Murphy	Toyota Gazoo Racing	47:34:27	+ 2:31:12
5	217	Henk Lategan*	Brett Cummigs	Toyota Gazoo Racing	47:39:38	+ 2:36:23
6	210	Martin Prokop	Viktor Chytka	ORLEN Team	48:43:59	+ 3:40:44
7	220	Juan Cruz Yacopini	Daniel Oliveras Carreras	Overdrive Racing	49:30:24	+ 4:27:09
8	224	Wei Han	Ma Li	HanWei Motorsport	49:32:36	+ 4:29:21
9	209	Sebastián Halpern	Bernardo Graue	X-raid Team	49:45:53	+ 4:42:38
10	206	Guerlain Chicherit	Alex Winocq	GCK Motorsport	50:25:25	+ 5:22:10

* – Not competing in World Rally-Raid Championship

Stage #14 winners

Class	Number	Competitor	Team	Time
T1	206	Guerlain Chicherit	GCK Motorsport	1:09:24
T2	250	Ronald Basso*	Team Land Cruiser Toyota Auto Body	1:30:01
T3	302	Cristina Gutiérrez	Red Bull Can-Am Factory Team	1:18:01
T4	444	Carlos Vento Sanchez*	Patriots Racing Team	1:21:54
T5	514	Vaidotas Paskevicius*	Fesh Fesh Team	1:18:34
RallyGP	47	Kevin Benavides	Red Bull KTM Factory Racing	1:15:17
Rally2	17	Romain Dumontier	Team Dumontier Racing	1:23:21
Malle Moto	40	Charan Moore*	HT Rally Raid Husqvarna Racing	1:28:03
Quad	162	Laisvydas Kancius	Story Racing SRO	1:36:16

Overall winners

Class	Number	Competitor	Team	Time
T1	200	Nasser Al-Attiyah	Toyota Gazoo Racing	45:03:15
T2	250	Ronald Basso*	Team Land Cruiser Toyota Auto Body	107:39:42
T3	303	Austin Jones	Red Bull Off-Road Junior Team	51:55:53
T4	428	Eryk Goczał	EnergyLandia Rally Team	53:10:14
T5	502	Janus van Kasteren	Boss Machinery Team de Rooy IVECO	54:03:33
RallyGP	47	Kevin Benavides	Red Bull KTM Factory Racing	44:27:20
Rally2	17	Romain Dumontier	Team Dumontier Racing	47:03:58
Malle Moto	40	Charan Moore*	HT Rally Raid Husqvarna Racing	52:24:42
Quad	151	Alexandre Giroud*	Drag’on Rally Team	56:44:30
Classic	778	Juan Morera*	Toyota Classic	428 points