2023 Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge: 55 on W2RC entry list

Over a month after the season began at the Dakar Rally, the World Rally-Raid Championship heads to Abu Dhabi for the thirty-second Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge. After registration closed Saturday, fifty-five comprise the pre-inspection W2RC grid. Thirty are competing in FIA classes while twenty-five are on bikes and quads.

As the Dakar Rally is the largest rally raid of the year, it comes with little surprise that Abu Dhabi would feature a much smaller field. Still, there are plenty of major absentees like T1’s Team Audi Sport, whose next start will be the season-ending Rallye du Maroc especially after a disastrous Dakar that resulted in Carlos Sainz and Stéphane Peterhansel‘s co-driver Édouard Boulanger suffering injuries in crashes. Although Peterhansel is the reigning ADDC overall winner, he is not among those on the entry list.

Mattias Ekström, the only Audi member to finish the Dakar, is also the lone driver of the three to enter Abu Dhabi albeit in a T3 for South Racing. Audi had an arrangement with X-raid Team to field Mini John Cooper Works for the Audi drivers outside of Dakar and Morocco if they wished, though it appears Sainz and Peterhansel did not take up the offer pending a belated or non-championship entry.

Despite Audi electing not to defend their victory, the W2RC T1 title battle continues between Sébastien Loeb and Nasser Al-Attiyah, the latter being both the defending Dakar and W2RC champion as well as the 2021 ADDC winner; Al-Attiyah had also won the Desert Challenge in 2016. However, Loeb’s nine Dakar stage victories and runner-up finish means he has a two-point edge over Al-Attiyah in the T1 standings.

In the Bikes, Sam Sunderland will hope to go back-to-back now that he has recovered from his injuries sustained at Dakar, as has Ricky Brabec. On the other hand, Sunderland’s team-mate Daniel Sanders will miss the rally due to injury.

Also skipping the race is Rally2 Dakar winner Romain Dumontier, though Rally2 riders are permitted to drop their worst finish from their championship standing. Of course, his absence blows the doors open in the meantime for Paolo Lucci and Michael Docherty, who joined him on the class podium in the opener. Konrad Dąbrowski makes his season début after missing Dakar with appendicitis.

Only five Quad riders are entered, with Abdulaziz Ahli leading the way as he aims for a three-peat.

With many Dakar entrants not returning, those headed to Abu Dhabi latched on with other teams. For example, Lucas Moraes is not racing despite an impressive third-place T1 finish at Dakar, though his co-driver Timo Gottschalk will assume the shotgun seat of fellow Toyota Hilux driver Yazeed Al-Rajhi who returns to racing after recovering from chest injuries sustained in a skiing accident. Al-Rajhi and Gottschalk previously worked together from 2014 to 2019.

Oriol Mena, who won the Dakar T4 overall as Eryk Goczał‘s navigator, will move up to T1 to work with Guoyu Zhang. Zhang is one of three Chinese entrants in Abu Dhabi BAIC team-mate Yunliang Zi and Han Wei, the latter being the highest four-wheel Dakar finisher for a Chinese driver.

It is important to note that some are not on the entry list as they are not competing for W2RC points. For example, Rally2 includes Justin Gerlach, an amateur rider making his first start in a world championship race, and Benjamin Melot, a regular at the ADDC who finished thirteenth in class at Dakar.

The Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge begins with a prologue on 26 February. The race, which will feature 1,311 kilometres of Special Stages, runs through 3 March.

FIA entry list

T1

T3

T4

FIM entry list

RallyGP

Rally2

Quad