Loeb next to suffer rollover in merciless Dakar Rally

World Rally Championship legend Sebastien Loeb suffered a brutal rollover at the start of Tuesday’s Stage 3 of the 2025 Dakar Rally.

Loeb’s Dacia Sandrider landed upside down just 12km into the shortened 327km test between Bisha and Al Henakiyah, leaving him with a severely damaged car.

The Frenchman was able to make some quick repairs and resume the stage after losing just eight minutes, but he had to stop again after 63km, ostensibly due to the previous crash.

Loeb’s troubles on Stage 3 have dealt a further blow to his hopes of winning Dakar for the first time, having already fared poorly in the opening stages of the 2025 event.

A number of issues, including a mechanical problem with the fans on his Dacia, had left him in sixth place going into Tuesday’s running, almost 19 minutes down on standings leader Henk Lategan of Toyota. Loeb’s team-mate Cristina Gutierrez had to sacrifice her own outing in order to help him reach the bivouac.

The 50-year-old described the second test in Bisha like an extended WRC rally, such was the intensity of the 48-hour marathon stage.

 “We didn’t expect so much,” he said. “Yesterday [Sunday] we had given up, we couldn’t make any more progress and we had already lost 40 minutes. We did 900 kilometres of WRC while the car worked.

“We went flat out and all over the place, and in the end, we managed to regain the lead,” he explained. “We made up a lot of the lost time and I think we are 14 minutes behind the stage winner, having lost 40 minutes along the way, which is not bad. Yesterday the car started to warm up and we noticed that the front fan was no longer turning.

“We started to lose power and crawled as best we could before we lost the rear fan, so there was only one left.

“We were going 30km/h when we lost the third fan, and the car came to a complete stop. We had to wait for it to cool down before we could restart it, we recovered a fan and went to the refuelling like this, waiting at the top of each dune for it to cool down before climbing the dune in front of us.

“And all of a sudden, the fan started working again. Pablo [Moreno] and Cristina [Gutierrez] arrived and helped us, especially Pablo who is a good mechanic. 

“They gave us a relay that we had already changed, and thanks to him for that fan, and by chance for the others, it started working again, and since then it’s been going full steam ahead. It’s a problem we’ve had since July and it’s what I was most worried about when I came; I hope it works.”