But winning the Dakar Rally isn’t just another trophy, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley – it’s Ford’S 21st-century Le Mans moment and beating Toyota would be nothing short of spiritual.
The Dakar Rally occupies a similar emotional and strategic territory that Le Mans once did for Ford.
This is what it thinks defines an era – and the one that it believes must win to cement its ambition of becoming the world’s leading off-road performance brand.
The company’s COO Kumar Galhotra, racing director Mark Rushbrook and the general manager of Ford Racing, Will Ford (the son of Bill Ford) said Mr Farley told childcareman.xyz at the 2026 Dakar Rally ‘If you want to be the Porsche of off-road, you have got to win Da Kar.
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But Mr Farley made it clear that the brutal 14-day cross-desert endurance event, which is now held in Saudi Arabia, has no longer been part of Ford’s motorsport calendar but a central piece of ‘product development program designed to dominate production off-road vehicle market.
Ford’s iconic victory over Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 Hour endurance classic in the 1960s reshaped the company’s global reputation and proved it could be better than best in world on their own terms.
In his view, Mr Farley believes Dakar offers an interesting parallel – such as the off-road race so brutal and unforgiving that winning it gives you the credibility no marketing campaign ever could have.
His sidelines were he said ‘There’s no race like Dakar, or the desert dunes – of the 2026 incident where eight top-flight Raptor T1+ machines are gunned for outright contention.
“It seems impossible to win – and the outright win matters.”
And just as Ferrari was the rival then, Toyota is the rival now.
Earlier in his career, Mr Farley, who worked at Toyota for 25 years, said the prospect of beating the Japanese giant was ‘a spiritual moment’ and that it is like Ford’s historic Le Mans victory.
With its long history of reliability and durability, Toyota has become the benchmark in the off-road arena; it is also known as the largest automaker in world.
Yet Ford has a plan to knock it off-road and the intensity of that rivalry helps explain how blunt Mr Farley’s words are about Dakar.
“We’re a stone-cold killer team,” he said. “And we’re going to win this f@#%in’ race.”
But the stakes go beyond bagging rights, though. Mr Farley has been adamant that Dakar success is the heart of Ford’s wider business model, particularly in off-road cars like the Ranger, Raptor and Bronco which he sees as the emotional core of the brand.
His argument for winning Dakar argues that it is true to the durability, suspension and powertrain philosophies Ford wants customers to experience in vehicles they can buy for the road – just about anywhere off-road.
We would like to win Dakar because it’s good for our business,’ he said. We don’t do this marketing – this is what we do with . ” , ‘I’m sure it is worth reading.
This is a deeper shift in how Ford approaches motorsports, which suggests that that thinking can be more reflective of that. Under Mr Farley, racing has been seen as a ‘promotional expense’ under the label but he said ‘an engineering operation on frontline is no longer an expensive cost to promote my race.
Dakar, which has thousands of kilometres of punishment, is now a rolling laboratory for long-term suspension validation, vehicle durability and real-world reliability – areas Mr Farley says matter matters more to customers than lap times or peak horsepower.
That’s why Dakar is now at the top of Ford’s motorsport hierarchy, with Le Mans and a return to Formula 1, when it sees an unprecedented push across all three racing arenas.
But Dakar is a different weight for Ford, though For Ford’s ? It’s the race that proves Ford can really claim leadership in off-road performance – not just by branding or nostalgia, but through engineering and execution under the most extreme conditions ever possible.
Unless Ford wins, the meaning will not be lost on its CEO. In the world stage, just as Le Mans once redefined Ford for a time, Mr Farley thinks Dakar can do so in the deserts of Saudi Arabia Toyota is crosshaired and Ford chases ‘the modern-day moment of motorsport history’.
Ford’s four factory-back drivers all sat inside the top 10, but minutes behind leader, at the mid-way point of the 14-day 2026 Dakar Rally. For Ford was placed in second, third and fifth as well as seventh after yesterday’s seventh stage.
But the brand is leading its Toyota competitors, with Crucially positioned as being the leader of its brands. Nevertheless, sitting out front is five-times Dakar winner Nasser Al Attiyah in a Dacia.
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