Sports program for the Queen of Rally announced in Paris with an e-fuel powered T1+ category prototype built by technical partner Aramco
Alpine already a protagonist in F1 and in the WEC world championship since 2024, Dacia ready for the challenge of the Dakar in 2025. The Renault group multiplies its sporting experiences by entrusting its best-selling brand in Europe with a program that goes beyond simple participation in the queen race of the rally-raid, which he will face as a constructor in the T1+ category. Nine-time world rally champion Sébastien Loeb and Spanish rally driver Cristina Gutiérrez will in fact compete with a Dacia prototype that will use a synthetic fuel produced by Aramco, world leader in the energy and chemical products sector.
Excellence in the field
—
The first appointment has already been set for the 2024 tests at the Morocco Rally, with a structure based on the skills of the Prodrive specialists, who have been in the forefront of motorsport for about 40 years, in the world of the Dakar and rally raids since 2020. A partnership important technique which is the only news formally anticipated on the occasion of a press conference which instead has left much more to the imagination. From a strategic point of view, Dacia’s participation in the Dakar is linked to the brand’s values of robustness and life in the open air, starting with the best seller Duster, but the investment naturally revolves around the choice of an internal combustion engine powered by e-fuel, i.e. the synthetic fuel produced by combining renewable hydrogen with captured CO2, thus obtaining a low-carbon product compatible with current engines. Nothing has been anticipated by Dacia on their use, but the clarification that the prototype will fall into the T1+ category and not the T1.U one suggests the presence of a traditional thermal unit, at most a hybrid powertrain connected to the wheels, and therefore not a range extender system with the combustion engine used as an on-board energy generator, intended to power the electric propulsion units connected to the wheels. Aramco’s involvement is even more crucial if we then consider its 20% stake in the new Horse company which brings together the production of heat and hybrid engines within the Renault group. “Dacia and the Dakar form the perfect pair, a true laboratory to demonstrate Dacia’s robustness and strong commitment to low-carbon mobility,” said Denis Le Vot, CEO of Dacia.
A star and a promise
—
The Dacia team has chosen 49-year-old French rally driver Sébastien Loeb as its standard-bearer, 9-time winner of the World Rally Championship and who has been participating in the Dakar since 2016. In 2021, he was behind the wheel of the Bahrain Raid Xtreme Hunter designed by the British team Prodrive. The story between Sébastien Loeb and Prodrive now continues at the wheel of a Dacia. The second wheel is entrusted to Cristina Gutierrez Herrero, the first Spanish woman to finish the Dakar in 2017 in the car category and who at the age of 31 already has 7 participations in the race to her credit, between 2017 and 2023. Cristina is also the champion of the female category of all terrain rallies in Spain since 2012.