M-Sport Ford took part in the 2024 Dakar to prepare for 2025, the year in which it will enter the race with the new car, the revamped Ford Raptor, and chase the overall victory in the Car class.
Today the British team, despite having withdrawn due to a breakdown on the vehicle entrusted to Nani Roma, revealed the first teaser of the car with which it will race starting from the next season of the W2RC and the Dakar: the Ford Raptor, precisely.
Ford Performance pushed hard to open this project, with the specific intention of making a sporty car which, at present, has no racing pedigree in its road version. This is a fascinating challenge, which however will have to wait another 12 months before actually starting.
“The Dakar is known as the toughest race in the world and as such is the perfect platform for our Raptor,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports.
“Drawing on our technical and design expertise and resources around the world, and M-Sport's decades of experience in building and running successful motorsport programmes, we will build on the enormous amount of knowledge gleaned from the Dakar Rally in this year to return with a full program in 2025.”
“Both Ford and M-Sport are family-owned companies that focus on people and products, which has allowed us to run many successful motorsport programs together over the past decades,” continued the American. “We expect this partnership to be no different and have built a strong global team united in the vision for success.”
M-Sport Ford will now have the time necessary not only to debut and develop the car, but also to find the right drivers for the – high – ambitions it believes it has for the future. The goal, needless to say, is to fight to win the Dakar and Audi Sport's withdrawal, which will take place at the end of this edition of the rally raid, could open up some interesting options.
First of all the one that leads to the three pilots who, from January 20th, will find themselves on foot. We are talking about Carlos Sainz, Stéphane Peterhansel and Mattias Ekstroem. For the moment it is only a fantasy market, but with three names of this caliber available, it would be a sporting crime not to try to take at least one of these and arrive at the 2025 Dakar among the real candidates for success.
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