Rallying-High five for Toyota but Al-Attiyah leads after Dakar second stage
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Jan 5 : Toyota drivers dominated the second stage of the Dakar Rally with the fastest five placings on Monday but Nasser Al-Attiyah took over at the top of the car standings for the Dacia Sandriders team.
The Qatari, a five times Dakar winner, was only eighth fastest on the 400km special stage from the port of Yanbu on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast to Al-Ula but ended the day seven seconds clear of Toyota's Seth Quintero.
American Quintero won the stage one minute and 42 seconds ahead of last year's overall runner-up Henk Lategan of South Africa.
Saudi Arabia's 2025 champion Yazeed Al-Rajhi was third for the Japanese manufacturer's Overdrive customer team after losing nearly half an hour on Sunday.
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Australian Toby Price, a double winner on two wheels, was fourth over the rough terrain in another Toyota Hilux T1+ with Portuguese teammate Joao Ferreira fifth.
"It was a good day. I am really quite happy to not really go crazy from the beginning, without any punctures," said Al-Attiyah.
"This is what we need to do for the next two or three days and then we can find our rhythm."
Belgian Guillaume de Mevius, whose opening stage win provided a big boost for co-driver Mathieu Baumel a year on from having a leg amputated, was third overall ahead of Lategan and France's nine-times world rally champion Sebastien Loeb in a Dacia.
The top seven were separated by less than three minutes.
Three different manufacturers have won so far, with Ford fastest on Saturday's prologue and Mini X-Raid on Sunday.
In the motorcycle category, Australia's defending champion Daniel Sanders won the stage and took the lead from Spanish KTM teammate Edgar Canet.
Overnight leader Canet was first on the road and had a minor fall after 100km that allowed Sanders to catch up and take a 30 second lead.
American 2024 winner Ricky Brabec remained third on his factory Honda, two minutes and 18 seconds off the pace.
British rider James Hillier, an Isle of Man TT winner, retired with a fracture just below the elbow after a fall 250km into Sunday's opening stage.
Indian rider Harith Noah, a Rally 2 class winner in 2024, also failed to start the stage after injuring his back on Sunday.
Tuesday's third stage winds through desert sands for 422km from and back to Al Ula.
The endurance rally runs for two weeks and over 7,994km - 4,840 of them in 13 timed stages - entirely within Saudi Arabia.
The Dakar began in 1978 as a race from Paris across the Sahara to the Senegalese capital but switched to South America in 2009 for security reasons and then Saudi Arabia in 2020.
It is also the first round of the World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC).
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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