Ford CEO Jim Farley says he won Dakar Rally isn’t just another trophy – it’s Ford’s Le Mans moment in the 21st century, and it beats Toyota would be downright spiritual.
The Dakar Rally moves on similar emotional and strategic terrain as Le Mans once did for Ford.
It’s the race the company believes can define an era – and which it believes it must win to cement its ambition to become the world’s leading off-road performance brand.
“If you want to be the Porsche off-road, you have to win Dakar,” Mr. Farley told Daily Sparkz at the 2026 Dakar Rally, which he attended with the company’s COO Kumar Galhotra, race director Mark Rushbrook and Ford Racing general manager Will Ford (Bill Ford’s son).
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Mr Farley made it clear that the brutal 14-day desert endurance race taking place in Saudi Arabia these days is no longer just part of Ford’s motorsport calendar, but a central part of a product development program aimed at dominating the production off-road vehicle market.
In the 1960s, Ford’s famous victory over Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance classic shaped the company’s global reputation and proved it could beat the world’s best on their own terms.
Mr Farley believes Dakar offers a modern parallel – an off-road race so punishing and unforgiving that victory confers the kind of credibility no marketing campaign could ever achieve.
“There is no race like the Dakar,” he said on the sidelines – or in the desert dunes – of the 2026 event, where eight top-class Raptor T1+ machines will battle it out for absolute competition.
“It seems impossible to win – and the overall victory counts.”
And just as Ferrari was the rival back then, Toyota is the rival today.
Mr Farley, who spent 25 years at Toyota early in his career, described the prospect of beating the Japanese giant at Dakar as “a spiritual moment” and compared it directly to Ford’s historic Le Mans triumph.
Toyota’s long-standing reputation for reliability and durability has made it the benchmark in the off-road sector and helped it become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world.
But Ford is determined to beat him off-road, and the intensity of that rivalry explains the bluntness of Mr Farley’s language in Dakar.
“We’re a stone-cold killing team,” he said. “And we’re going to win this damn race.”
But it’s about much more than just showing off. Mr. Farley has made it clear that Dakar success underpins Ford’s broader business strategy, particularly in off-road vehicles such as the Ranger, Raptor and Bronco, which he sees as the brand’s emotional core.
Winning the Dakar, he argues, validates the durability, suspension and powertrain philosophies that Ford wants to convey to its customers in vehicles they can buy for the road – and virtually anywhere off-road.
“We want to win Dakar because it’s good for our business,” he said. “It’s not marketing – it’s what we do.”
This mindset reflects a deeper shift in Ford’s approach to motorsports. Under Mr Farley, racing will no longer be treated as an advertising expenditure but as a frontline technical intervention.
The Dakar, with its thousands of punishing kilometers, has become a rolling laboratory for long-term validation of suspension, vehicle durability and real-world reliability – areas that Mr Farley says are more important to customers than lap times or peak performance.
It’s also why, alongside Le Mans and the return to Formula 1, Dakar now sits at the top of Ford’s motorsport hierarchy as the company anticipates an unprecedented push into all three racing arenas.
But for Ford, Dakar has a unique meaning. It’s the race that proves whether Ford can truly take the lead in off-road performance – not just through branding or nostalgia, but through engineering and execution in the toughest conditions imaginable.
And if Ford succeeds, the importance of its CEO will not be lost. Just as Le Mans once redefined Ford on the world stage, Mr Farley believes Dakar can do the same – this time in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, with Toyota in the crosshairs and Ford chasing a modern moment in motorsport history.
At the halfway point of the 14-day 2026 Dakar Rally, Ford’s four factory drivers were all sitting in the top 10, albeit just a few minutes behind the leader. After yesterday’s seventh stage, Ford was in second, third, fifth and seventh place.
What matters is that the brand leads its Toyota competitors. At the front, however, is five-time Dakar winner Nasser Al Attiyah in a Dacia.
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