The Dakar Rally has been looking for the heir to the totems of recent times for some time. The absence of Stéphane Peterhansel, winner of 14 editions of the event, and the withdrawal of Carlos Sainz, four-time winner, at the first opportunity in the 2025 edition have paved the way for the numerous candidates for the most precious crown of the rally-raid.
With another stage victory in the eighth special of the test, Henk Lategan, a 30-year-old South African who competes for Toyota, remains convinced that he can break the statistic of the last decade. Since 2015, the toughest rally on the planet has been shared between Peterhansel, Sainz and Nasser Al-Attiyah, the only one who remains in the race at this point in the film. The 54-year-old Qatari, winner of five ‘Touaregs’ trophies, is more than half an hour behind the leader after losing more than 10 minutes in the 487 kilometers timed between Al Duwadimi and Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
“We continue in the fight, there are four days left and we will see. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not. The important thing is that we are here,” the only living favorite for victory in the race resigned himself. Other usual suspects such as Sébastien Loeb and Nani Roma have also been ruled out for days to win the jackpot. On another day in which navigation was once again complicated, no one ended up completely happy. The drivers negotiated some notable dunes on the course, also strong rocks capable of threatening the health of the tires. Despite suffering a puncture and having a brief confusion with the road book in a narrow canyon, Lategan not only saved another day at the front of the Dakar – and now there are six – but also took his second special stage in the 2025 edition , the fourth of his career, with a time of 4h51m54s.
The son of a multidisciplinary competition driver, Lategan inherited his father Hein’s passion for motor sport and, specifically, rallying. The two formed a duo when Henk was 15 years old, with his father acting as co-pilot in his first steps. In less than a decade, the kid became the youngest South African rally-raid champion in history, surpassing in the event a legend of the discipline like Giniel de Villiers, the only Dakar winner from the African continent. The current leader of the rally has experienced the best and worst side of the race in his four participations: he debuted in 2021 with an accident and serious injury in the fifth stage, and the same shoulder setback prevented him from running the 2024 edition and spent six months in the dry dock.
In 2023, Lategan had achieved his best overall result, with a worthy fifth place, a year after having achieved his first two stage victories. “The level is very high, but we have prepared better than ever. We feel that we can push and show what we are capable of,” he said from the Bisha camp, before starting the rally. “Every year we have learned important lessons, and now it is about putting all the elements together into a complete race. The Dakar is very demanding on a mental level, and not making mistakes is very difficult,” he warned. There are still four stages left and he would never claim victory early, but the competition smiles on him for now. His teammate, Saudi billionaire Yazeed Al Rajhi, is hot on his heels with less than six minutes left on the table.
Since 2004, the date of Peterhansel’s first win in cars – after amassing six on a motorcycle – only three drivers have managed to defeat the veteran multiple Dakar champions: Luc Alphand (2006), De Villiers (2009) and Nani Roma (2014) . This situation was quite worrying to ASO, the French promoter of the competition. Its director, David Castera, has been insisting for several years on the importance of finding new figures and references in the four-wheeled category. “We have some drivers who are almost retired, and what I like most is seeing young people arrive. Although the old are leaving, the young are arriving, a very relevant fact for the future,” the former French driver commented to Morning Express before the start of the rally.
In addition to Lategan’s role, Castera wanted to highlight other prominent figures of this new generation of leading pilots. “There is a new generation that is less than 30-35 years old, and we haven’t seen that in a long time. “We have seen Cristina Gutiérrez stand out, in addition to what it means to have a woman in an official team like Dacia, also Mitch Guthrie Jr. in Ford, Guillaume de Mevius in Mini and Seth Quintero and Lucas Moraes in Toyota,” said the leader. .
In the motorcycle category, the eighth stage maintained the script of the entire race, a tug of war between the leader Daniel Sanders (KTM) and the main contender, the Spanish Tosha Schareina (Honda). The 29-year-old Valencian rider came close to winning the stage – which Luciano Benavides (KTM) took with a time of 4h50m46s – and shaved more than four minutes off the Australian, who still has more than ten minutes of margin in the general classification. . The American Ricky Brabec, defender of the crown and fifth classified more than half an hour on the time table, announced that the stages on Tuesday and Wednesday could be decisive: “I think the race will be sentenced at the end of the tenth stage, The last days will not count.”
