Dakar Rally 2025 results: Red Bull KTM’s Sanders fastest in Prologue

03 January 2025 | Rally

Prologue smologue…what does it matter? This initial burst of speed, a short 29-kilometre sprint, is nothing compared to the stages to come but it does matter. It’s the first raced stage and that means hitting your timing marks starts today. Plus you can’t gain much but you can lose a lot if you crash – ask Sherco’s Harith Noah about that...
The result also affects start position for stage one tomorrow which might not be crucial for 90 percent of the entry but if you want to win this race then the daily start positions have a big impact on how the stage results, and ultimately the overall results, play out.
With the top 10 riders getting to choose their start position (anywhere inside the top 10 with P1 going first and so on), this is the first move in a 5000km-long game of chess.
KTM’s new Spanish hotshot Edgar Canet showed his motocross skills on his debut with an early fast time which was a long while being beaten. His Australian teammate Daniel Sanders did just that with the only sub-17-minute time to go top at 16m52s.

“It was good to get the nerves out of the system,” said Sanders. “I was a pretty clean run, just a couple of mistakes but that’s what happens when you push, you push on in a couple of corners and the dangers sneak up on you a little too much. But hopefully that was enough to put me in a good position to choose a good start position for tomorrow.”

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2024 World Rally Raid Champion Ross Branch was the final of the 134 riders away. Wearing number one on his Hero machine, the Botswanan slotted in an almost identical time to the 19-year-old Canet, splitting the Red Bull KTM duo on the results sheets by virtue of a 0.4s faster time.
Reigning champion Ricky Brabec showed no signs of his Moroccan injury carrying over here to Saudi with fourth fastest, 18 seconds down on Sanders. Brabec headed a Honda quartet with Tosha Schareina for once not fastest on the prologue finishing fifth ahead of his veteran teammates Pablo Quintanilla and Adrien Van Beveren.
Rally 2 regular Michael Docherty was eighth, Skyler Howes ninth and Sebastien Buhler completed the top 10 for Hero.
Bad news for the 2024 11th place scratch and Rally 2 winner Harith Noah who showed why every step of the Dakar journey is a tightrope by crashing out on the factory Sherco, fracturing his wrist at this very early stage.
Riders face nearly 500km on stage one, 413km of it against the clock over a mixture of terrain on a southern loop from Bisha. The second 48 hour stage over two days begins the day after...

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Photo Credit: Edo Bauer + A.S.O. | DPPI Julien Delfosse + F. Gooden + J. Lindini + A. Vincent

Written by Jon Pearson
jon.pearson@enduro21.com