The South African driver and navigator duo of Henk Lategan and Brett Cummings brought their Toyota Gazoo Racing Hilux home first on the 2025 Dakar Rally’s prologue in and around the town of Bisha in southwest Saudi Arabia.
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Friday’s prologue consisted of just 79 km, and only 29 km of that timed on technical sandy terrain. Although the times on the prologue do not count toward the overall classifications, the mental advantage of finishing ahead of former champions should put Lategan and Cummings in good stead ahead of the pack for Saturday’s first stage.
“Usually, I struggle to get going on the short stages. I need about twenty kilometres to warm up, but we knew this was quite important for the road position on the first stage, so we pushed a little bit. The terrain was really tricky. The pace is so high, it’s such high speeds and there were a lot of really narrow spots where if you get it right you can go through really quickly but if you get it wrong it can go really wrong,” Lategan said after the prologue.
Fellow South Africans Brian Baragwanath and Leonard Cremer from Century Racing, and Toyota Gazoo Racing teammates Saood Variawa and Frenchman Francois Cazalet managed respectable finishes in 6th and 10th overall.
There were many eyes on the new Dacia Sandriders team, which consists of five-time Dakar winner Nasser Al-Attiyah, WRC legend and perennial Dakar contender Sébastien Loeb, and 2024 T3 category champion Cristina Gutiérrez. The Dacia Sandrider is a T1+ prototype powered by a twin-turbocharged V6. Al-Attiyah would finish the prologue 20 seconds behind Lategan, third overall. Loeb and Gutiérrez were 7th and 16th respectively.
Mattias Ekström and Emil Bergvist set a solid pace in their M-Sport Ford Raptor early, with the Swedes managing to finish the prologue just one second behind Lategan and Cummings. Defending champions Carlos Sainz and Lucas Cruz are new additions to the M-Sport team, and managed to finish 25th fastest, 1 minute 14 seconds behind Lategan.
Saturday’s first special stage is where The Dakar really begins, where the competitors will face a 413 km special and 499 km in total before returning to the Bisha bivouac.
