2025 Dakar Rally: Chrono Stage (Pt 1) Photo Gallery

Heading out of Bisha to tackle a 947 km loop to the north-east of the city over two days, the competitors only had a vague inkling of where they would be spending the night today, beyond the fact that it would be one of the six breakzones between km 491 and km 671 of the special. This stage —the longest in this edition— is a wild one in the sporting and the literal sense: the camps are sprinkled around the Majami’ al-Hadb Reserve, home to Arabian hares, which got a front-row ticket to see Carlos Sainz and his overturned Ford Raptor struggle like a tortoise on its back. “Slow and steady wins the race”, as the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine put it in his retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare. Tomorrow, starting at 7 am, the field will get going at one-minute intervals to complete the second half of stage 2. The outcome of the story will not be exactly the same as last year in the car category, as the reigning champion is still very much in the race.

Images courtesy ASO, Red Bull, and KTM.