By Mark Rushbrook
Global Director, Ford Racing
December 18, 2025
For any brand wanting to stake a claim to owning off-road racing, Dakar stands out head and shoulders above all others. It strips everything down to fundamentals — durability, speed, teamwork, preparation — and it does so over two relentless weeks and thousands of competitive kilometers. There is no place to hide. That is exactly why the 2026 Dakar Rally represents such a meaningful moment for Ford.
This January 3-17 will mark the first time we compete at Dakar under the Ford Racing banner, and that carries real significance. Ford Racing isn’t simply a new name for our competitive efforts. It is a fully integrated business built to connect racing, engineering, product development, customer experience, and brand in a way Ford has never done before. What we prove in competition now flows directly and intentionally into the vehicles our customers buy.
Our commitment to Dakar reflects that shift. In 2026, we will field our largest Raptor T1+ presence ever:
- Four factory Ford Racing Raptor T1+ entries, piloted from our same 2025 team
- Four additional privateer Raptor T1+ vehicles competing on the same core platform
Those privateer entries are a deliberate part of how we grow the Raptor T1+ ecosystem globally — sharing technology, data, and durability across customer teams who are pushing the same hardware in the same extreme conditions. That depth strengthens the program, accelerates learning, and reinforces the credibility of the Raptor T1+ platform at every level of competition.
The Ford Raptor T1+ itself represents the most complete expression yet of what we’ve learned through years of desert racing. It is lighter, more aerodynamically efficient, delivers dramatically improved visibility and control, and incorporates meaningful gains in suspension performance, cockpit access, and overall durability. These improvements are rooted in competition data, stage-by-stage analysis, and the realities of what it takes to survive and perform at Dakar.
Our technical partnerships with M-Sport, FOX, Method Race Wheels, and Optima Batteries remain central to that progress. Together, we continue to evolve the platform through real world experience and analytical tools — not simulation. The technology that survives Dakar directly influences future Ford off-road products.
At the same time, Ford Racing today is also very much a business, and a growing one. We’ve proven across our Mustang programs what true race-to-road integration can deliver. From GT3 and GT4 to our customer racing in Dark Horse R and one-make series efforts, the lessons from track competition have flowed directly into production Mustangs - improving performance, reliability, and customer confidence while building a profitable global performance ecosystem around the car. That same philosophy now fully extends to Raptor T1+ and our off-road portfolio.
Our earlier years at Dakar were about building knowledge: understanding the race, the rhythms, the terrain, and the operational demands. That phase was necessary. The phase we enter now is different. With scale, experience, and eight Raptor T1+ vehicles in the field, our mindset has shifted from accumulation to execution. The objective is no longer to validate the program. The objective is to contend for overall victory.
Ford’s relationship with racing has always been about more than competition alone. From Henry Ford’s first race in 1901 to today’s global motorsport footprint, racing has served as our most demanding engineering laboratory and one of our most powerful brand amplifiers. Under Ford Racing, that connection is now shorter, faster, and more accountable than ever before.
Dakar remains the most extreme test of that philosophy. When a system, a component, or a concept works here, it has earned its place in the next generation of Ford performance vehicles.
We arrive in 2026 with confidence in our preparation, belief in our drivers and engineers, and absolute faith in the Raptor T1+ platform we have built together. This is the strongest Dakar effort Ford has ever mounted, and a defining moment for Ford Racing as a global performance business.
