A Dacia Sandrider in the dunes. The team arrives in Morocco leading all three W2RC championships. Photo: Dacia / The Dacia Sandriders via Newspress (editorial use).
The Dacia Sandriders go to Morocco leading every table the FIA World Rally-Raid Championship keeps: drivers, navigators and manufacturers. That reads like a team in cruise control. Look one line lower and it is anything but. The closest threat to Sébastien Loeb is not a Toyota. It is Nasser Al-Attiyah, three points behind in an identical Dacia Sandrider, and their navigators, Édouard Boulanger and Fabian Lurquin, are split by the same three points.
With two rounds left, Rallye du Maroc (September 29 to October 3) and the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in November, Dacia’s real job this week is refereeing a title fight it has already won half of, without letting the third man in.
Rallye du Maroc 2026 at a glance
Series: FIA World Rally-Raid Championship, Round 4 of 5
Dates: September 29 – October 3
Route: Agadir to Zagora, then four days based at the Zagora bivouac
Stages: 5 | Timed distance: 1,575 km | Total distance: 2,524 km
Dacia crews: #219 Loeb/Boulanger, #299 Al-Attiyah/Lurquin, #223 Moraes/Moreno
The standings, read the way a strategist reads them
Here is the top of the drivers’ table after three of five rounds:
- Sébastien Loeb (Dacia) – 114 points
- Nasser Al-Attiyah (Dacia) – 111
- Seth Quintero (Toyota Gazoo Racing W2RC) – 101
- Lucas Moraes (Dacia) – 57
- Henk Lategan – 56
The number that should worry Dacia is 101. Quintero sits 13 points off the lead and 10 behind Al-Attiyah. When two team-mates trade blows for the win, the classic outcome is that they split the big results between them and the consistent outsider collects steady points from third. Quintero doesn’t need to beat both Dacias in Morocco. He needs them to take points off each other while he keeps his car on the piste.
The manufacturers’ table removes one of the usual arguments for team orders. Dacia has 315 points to Toyota Gazoo Racing W2RC’s 250 and Ford Racing’s 161. A 65-point cushion with two rounds left means the constructor title isn’t the lever that forces anyone to hold station yet. Team principal Tiphanie Isnard called protecting all three championship leads the team’s “absolute priority,” which is diplomatic phrasing for: please don’t crash into each other’s season.
Al-Attiyah, for his part, openly wants a “clean rally” after problems in the last two rounds. He was third in Argentina, which kept him in the fight but let Loeb keep the edge. If you’re new to the format and wondering why a third place in a week-long event can be decisive, our explainer on how rally-raid differs from traditional stage rally covers the navigation, distance and penalty structure that makes consistency worth so much.
The rulebook changed since Loeb’s last Moroccan scare
Loeb won here last year, but he admits it was close, and that he had a fright when he missed a waypoint in the Power Selective Section. That element no longer exists. The FIA World Motor Sport Council scrapped the Power Selective Section for 2026, saying it created operational headaches for organisers and officials without delivering the live-broadcast payoff it was meant to.
The more interesting change for this week is a quieter one. Under the same package of updates, prologues now run only at the season opener, and the Stage 1 running order at later rounds is set by the championship standings. In rally-raid, starting first isn’t a prize. The lead car opens the road: no tyre tracks to confirm the line, no dust plume ahead to hint at the route, and every roadbook note has to be read cold. It is where waypoint misses and lost minutes live.
So on Tuesday’s run east from Agadir, the championship leader is the one doing the pathfinding, with his closest rival right behind using the fresh tracks. Leading by three points buys Loeb and Boulanger the hardest job on the opening day. Watch the Stage 1 gap between the two Dacias closely: a small deficit for Loeb is the rule working as designed, not a sign he’s off the pace.
Four nights in Zagora, and one very long Friday
After Stage 1 takes the field from the coast at Agadir to Zagora, in the Draa Valley, the rally stays put. Zagora hosts the bivouac for the remaining four days, its first appearance on the itinerary since 2024. Stage 2 on Wednesday runs west of the town, Stage 3 on Thursday heads northeast, and Stage 5 on Saturday finishes with a route to the south.
Stage 4 on Friday, October 2, is the one to circle. It is the longest of the week at 384 timed kilometres, well above the event’s roughly 315-kilometre average per stage. Long stages are where navigation errors compound and where a car with a small mechanical issue loses real time instead of a handful of seconds. If the drivers’ lead changes hands, Friday is the likeliest place for it.
A single base for four nights also matters for the crews. Teams aren’t packing up and relocating the service operation every evening, so mechanics get more time on the cars between stages. That lowers the odds of a reliability-driven result, which tends to favour whoever is simply fastest and cleanest on the navigation.
The reigning champion changes navigators with two rounds to go
The third Dacia gets a new voice in the right seat. Pablo Moreno, who navigated for Cristina Gutiérrez, replaces Dennis Zenz alongside Lucas Moraes. Gutiérrez and the team agreed over the summer that she would leave the programme she had been part of since its 2024 launch.
Swapping navigators late in a season is a bigger deal than it sounds. In rally-raid the navigator isn’t reading pace notes written during recce; they are interpreting a roadbook issued on the eve of each stage, managing waypoints and calling the terrain in real time. The driver has to trust those calls instantly, at speed, over dunes. That trust is built in kilometres, and Moreno arrives with none alongside Moraes. His own description of Morocco as a place to “start working together” and prepare for Abu Dhabi tells you the team sees this round as part investment.
There is also a championship wrinkle. Navigators score their own title, and Zenz’s 57 points, fourth in that table, stay with him. Moraes carries the same 57 in the drivers’ standings, 57 points off the lead. Realistically, his job is less about his own title defence and more about being the Dacia that stands between Quintero and a podium. Every position he takes from a Toyota protects both team-mates at the front.
Moraes knows the terrain. He clinched the 2025 world title on this event before joining Dacia, and he comes in fresh from winning the Rally dos Sertões in his home country of Brazil.
Dacia’s Moroccan record, in context
The Sandriders have raced Rallye du Maroc twice and won it twice: Al-Attiyah on the team’s first visit in 2024, then Loeb in 2025, when Boulanger also sealed the navigators’ world title and Al-Attiyah finished runner-up in the drivers’ championship. The team has taken a W2RC podium at every round since the 2025 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, a run that includes wins on this year’s Dakar and Rally-Raid Portugal plus third in Argentina.
Before Dacia arrived, Morocco had different winners in the W2RC era: Guerlain Chicherit in 2022 and Yazeed Al Rajhi in 2023. It’s not a rally that historically belongs to one team, which makes a Dacia hat-trick a real target rather than a formality.
Loeb, meanwhile, returns to the Sandrider after a long gap since Argentina, and he hasn’t exactly been idle. His rally schedule has included a nostalgic outing we covered in Loeb’s C4 WRC reunion with his daughter as co-driver. Rhythm in the rally-raid car, over five long days, is a different muscle.
What to watch in Morocco
- Stage 1, Tuesday, September 29: Loeb opens the road under the standings-based running order. Measure his time against Al-Attiyah’s with that handicap in mind.
- Stage 4, Friday, October 2: 384 timed kilometres, the longest day. Navigation errors and mechanical issues cost the most here.
- Seth Quintero and Toyota: 13 points from the lead. A clean, consistent rally could put him right in the mix heading to Abu Dhabi.
- Moraes and Moreno: a first competitive week together. Early waypoint penalties would tell you the partnership is still bedding in.
- Team management: if Loeb and Al-Attiyah run one-two into Saturday, how Dacia handles the final stage says a lot about how it plans to settle the title in Abu Dhabi.
- Ford Racing: third in the manufacturers’ standings on 161 points. Its broader desert programme has been bold, as shown when Ford sent a fully restricted Dakar truck to America’s toughest desert race.
The shortest version: Dacia has built the best car in the championship and hired enough talent to make it complicated. Morocco won’t decide the title, but it will decide which Sandrider crew heads to Abu Dhabi with the upper hand, and whether Toyota is still close enough to exploit an argument between them.
Sources: The Dacia Sandriders Rallye du Maroc preview (September 24, 2026); FIA World Rally-Raid Championship official standings and calendar; FIA World Motor Sport Council W2RC regulation update (November 2025).
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