Stuck in the desert for 10 hours — twice: Sébastien Loeb on his nightmare Dakar 2021

The Frenchman bounced back on Stage Two though, setting the sixth fastest time, but hit further navigation issues which would continue to plague him for the rest of the rally.

Sometimes a Dakar driver has to use compass directions, at other times just follow the tyre tracks of those that have gone before. For Loeb the latter became increasingly difficult as the shifting sands of Saudi Arabia made it almost impossible for the driver to find a well-defined route.

“For me, as long as you’re off-road, you sometimes need to follow the compass – it’s not a problem,” he says. “The main issue occurs when we needed to go to follow a track [made by other cars] and the track disappears because it was windy before.

“And when you are on the track, you need to follow it. It’s [successful navigation] not only [down to] the compass. The compass can change but you [sometimes] still need to follow [the tracks made by other cars]. But if you don’t see the lines, you don’t see the tracks, you don’t know where to go. And that causes problems.”

Loeb battled on though and, despite picking up three more punctures, was sixth fastest again on Stage Three to haul himself up the same position in the overall standings.

He went even further on Stage Four, a 209-mile run from Wadi Ad-Dawasir to the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh. Loeb had risen to fourth, just one place off the podium placings, after being 22nd on Stage One. It was clear, on pace at least, that Loeb and the Hunter are a potent combination.

However, it was here that things started to really unravel. Loeb exceeded the speed limit in a controlled area, and was duly slapped with a 5-minute penalty. The BRX driver blamed a faulty GPS system for not warning him (via an electronic alarm sounding) that he was in a slow zone, with even the equipment provider backing him up. However, the stewards were unrelenting.

The Frenchman was not backward with coming forwards in directing his subsequent ire towards the stewards.

“You have begun to know me a little for all these years and I very rarely ‘rant’,” Loeb said in a post on Instagram.

“But tonight, I need to share with you the incompetence of the stewards’ panel of an event as legendary as the Dakar Rally. We have just been penalised five minutes for exceeding speed in a controlled area. In all my participations, in all the stages and in all the speed control zones, I always respect this rule as best I can.

The organisers conceded on the point of navigational difficulties with Loeb by this point, as so many competitors got lost on the fifth stage that they elected to shorten the following one.

However, if the BRX driver thought this might have brought some kind of respite, he was wrong, as a heavy impact spelt more disaster.

“In a double jump on a landing, we broke a [suspension] wishbone and then we started to be really in the shit, because we lost 10 hours in the desert.”

The Hunter was unable to continue. As night fell, Loeb and his co-driver Elena waited patiently for the recovery truck carrying the spare parts needed to carry on. Just as they thought their saviour had arrived, things got even worse.

The truck had brought the incorrect component due to some lax labelling. It was a case of right label – wrong part.

“Surprise! So at this point, we lost completely the race.”

Loeb and his co-driver were forced to amuse themselves and take refuge with a following camera crew.

“We had a little contact with the satellite mobile but we had no connection on the mobile phone. Yes, I played a little bit on my mobile,” recounts Loeb.

“We had a TV crew that came to film us and they made a little bivouac there and so we could go stay with them in a tent and have a coffee.”

The BRX pair had to wait for the correct part to arrive and spent over 24 hours awake as a result, but took advantage of a rest day to try and at least finish the rally, with all hope of a win long gone.

They set out on the first part of the ‘Marathon Stage’, only to suffer their seventh puncture before being hit by a wheel bearing failure, just 30km from the finish. The pair eventually made it to the end of the stage, but were now well down the order in 41st.

It seemed like fate was conspiring against them – but the Dakar wasn’t done yet.

The BRX recovery truck wich transports all spare parts had now failed to make it to the end of stage having broken its rear axle, so couldn’t get requisite spare parts and wheels to Loeb. The team made the sporting decision to give his remaining spare tyres and parts to teammate Nani Roma, who still had the chance of a good finish.

Loeb tentatively set off on Stage Eight desperately hoping nothing else would break.

“We had to start the next day, [with] only three brakes and one spare (tyre) instead of three,” says Loeb. “And then we punctured again (twice), and the truck was not allowed to go into stage because he had ‘retired’.”

Loeb and Elena were stranded once more in the desert, and with two punctures and no way to fix them, they were out of the rally. Valiantly as they had fought, their Dakar 2021 was over.

Despite having his abilities and patience tested to the limit, Loeb is remarkably upbeat about the overall potential of the project.

“[It was] a lot of little things that caused a lot of loss of time and even the retirement but at the end, I think the car performed quite well,” he reasons.

“I think we are in the game or not far from it. I’m sure if we needed to start the Dakar tomorrow, we the team would be able to solve the problem and we will be fine with that.

“Dakar, we know it’s always a very tough race and every time a new manufacturer enters, you always have some surprises even if we did some good testing. We knew that 5000km will be tough and we discovered some little problems, but at the end it’s not so big.”

With plans to enter more cross-country rallies and next year’s Dakar with the BRX Hunter, the Frenchman hopes for a future Saudi layout which puts both more emphasis on him the driver and suits his driving style.

“Obviously for me the stages were nicer before [on previous Dakars] than now,” Loeb comments. “It’s the first time I did it in Saudi. We had some nice sand stages with a lot of desert and nothing around but also a lot of big stones also.

“For me there’s no nice track to push like we had in Chile – [ where] you have for 20 or 30kms of nice twisty road where you can really push, and we didn’t have anything like that in Saudi’

“I think they should find something different – it was not so interesting to drive in my opinion or [suited] for my driving style. And even when it was a bit twisty, there were so many stones that we had to go around – we were only concentrated on avoiding punctures more than going fast. That’s not really what I like.”

Whatever their trials and tribulations this year, the BRX Hunter’s potential performance combined with the steely determination of the world’s most successful rally driver should make them a force not to be discounted at Dakar 2022.