Second day of racing at the Dakar and second victory for a hybrid Audi: after yesterday's prologue, the Spanish Carlos Sainz, father of the Ferrari driver and three-time winner of the Dakar, won the first stage of the rally-raid, a 368-kilometer loop on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.
Sainz won by 23 seconds over another favorite of this 45th edition, the Frenchman Sébastien Loeb (Prodrive), and 47 over the winner of the prologue, his Swedish teammate, Mattias Ekstrom.
The provisional classification of the rally-raid that will cross the Saudi sands until January 15 sees Carlos Sainz in the lead, followed by Loeb and Ekstrom.
The winner of the 2022 edition, Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah (Toyota), occupies eighth place at more than 7 minutes.