Dacia cools Dakar expectations after debut 1-2 at Rallye du Maroc

Dacia Sandriders technical director Philip Dunabin has played down expectations for the team’s first run at the Dakar Rally despite securing a 1-2 on its debut at the Rallye du Maroc.

The Romanian manufacturer has partnered with Prodrive to contest the World Rally Raid Championship [WR2C], including a tilt at the Dakar beginning in Saudi Arabia on 3 January, with Nasser Al-Attiyah, Sebastien Loeb and Cristina Gutierrez onboard to pilot the three-car entry.

Having headed to Morocco in October as a live test in competition, five-time Dakar winner Al-Attiyah and Loeb secured a 1-2 despite suffering small issues – such as cooling troubles – while Gutierrez ran older components to perform length-of-life experiments.

Despite the strong result out of the box though, Dunabin has insisted there is no expectation to win at Dakar.

Asked what the target was, Dunabin said: “It’s to do as well as we can. There is not a presumption on Dacia’s side that Dacia can come in and win straightaway.

“We obviously hope we have speed, what we don’t know is you need to do a Dakar to get experience and to know you have the reliability that will take you that distance.

“So I think to start off, Dacia probably thought we could go and get a run, get experience and whatever – perhaps the expectation has come up a bit because of results in Morocco.

“But there is no obligation that we deliver a winning result straight out. If we do that, it’ll be great, but there is no presumption.

“We did break down, we did have struggles, it wasn’t all plain sailing. It may have looked tremendous but we had some challenges for sure.

“From certain perspectives it is like ‘you’ve won, job done, you can just go to Dakar and that’s it’ but there’s a lot of work to do. We still have a lot of critical components to look over.”

Running through the tests done on Gutierrez’s car that saw her finish the Moroccan event 78th overall, Dunabin told Autosport: “There were certain elements of the car – particularly on Cristina’s car – that had been used for testing and we didn’t change components that we knew were not in as good condition as they could have been.

“Why you do that is because you can go and do testing and learn a lot of things, but there is nothing quite like actually doing the events.

Dacia Sandriders, Rally del Marocco

Photo by: Motorsport.com

“So you take the components you know are probably coming to what you think is a normal lifetime, you leave them on the car and you go and do the Morocco rally with it because that gives you the margin you are looking for when you set off on the Dakar.”

Chief mechanic Alistair Gibson added: “It was really important for the team that we did have some challenges on one of the cars.

“The car was the test car, we were doing endurance testing on that car anyway, we knew that, and it was stuff we had to find out the hard way.

“We also, when we did have a few little challenges, how the team reacts is really good learning for everybody because when it happens on the Dakar, you need to be sharp.”