Nine times world champion, second in the Dakar 2023, Sébastien Loeb is still not satisfied despite his 49 springs. The rally legend will make his appearance again for the Dakar 2025, which he will contest on behalf of Dacia. The Renault group brand will start in this race with the former Citroën driver but also with the Spaniard Cristina Guiterrez.
The 49-year-old nine-time world rally champion, second in the event in 2023, will be accompanied by his current co-driver, Fabian Lurquin. He will test a Dacia prototype from the end of 2024 at the Morocco Rally. The model will be prepared by the ProDrive team, already Loeb’s partner in the world rally-raid championship, of which the Dakar was the first round this year.
The second car of the Dacia team will be entrusted to Cristina Gutierrez, 31, who became the first Spanish woman in the car category to finish the Dakar in 2017. The young but experienced driver knows Loeb well, with whom she won the Extreme E electric 4×4 competition.
The two prototypes, whose model is to be unveiled in early 2024, will run on synthetic fuel, produced by combining hydrogen with carbon dioxide. Dacia has teamed up for this fuel with the oil giant Saudi Aramco, a partner of Renault, and a public company in the country which has hosted the Dakar since 2020. The Saudi company had also said at the start of 2023 that it was planning with its partners two demonstration plants in Spain and in the kingdom. The first operations are expected in early 2025, she said in an email to AFP.
“The Dakar is by nature a full-scale technological laboratory. It is becoming a laboratory for low-carbon mobility,” Dacia boss Denis Le Vot said at a press conference in Saint-Denis, near Paris. “We wouldn’t have gone to the Dakar without synthetic fuel. The Romanian brand is responsible for continuing to develop combustion engines within the group, while Renault and Alpine are building their electric range. Dacias had so far only competed in the Dakar on a private basis.
Dacia, which records very good sales with its basic and inexpensive cars, wants to promote its new “all-terrain” identity on the tracks of the Dakar. The brand will launch in parallel with the race a larger and more elegant SUV than its current Duster, the Bigster, designed to appeal to more affluent customers in Germany or the United Kingdom.
Dacia will give itself the necessary means in the race and “does not want to finish fifth or sixth”, underlined Mr. Le Vot. The Dakar will also be “the priority” for Sébastien Loeb, said the driver, who has also joined the world rallycross championship (World RX).
With Dacia, “the plan is to make the rally-raid championship in 2025-2026, it’s important to progress”, indicated the Alsatian champion, who, in seven participations, has never won the famous rally- raid. “He’s my mentor, he’s a legend,” said Cristina Gutierrez alongside her. “And we get on very well, it’s important to develop the car. »
After Dacia on the Dakar, will we soon see another brand from the Renault group, this time on the roads used by the WRC World Rally Championship? Alpine, already present in Formula 1, could indeed return to the WRC, a category which saw the Renault sports brand win the championship in 1973, with the Alpine 110. If no project has yet been formalized, General Manager Luca de Meo explained last year that he wanted to make Alpine “a kind of catalyst for the French industry” in motorsport.