Ford CEO Jim Farley says winning the Dakar Rally isn’t just another trophy – 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.
It’s the race the company believes can define an era – and the one it feels it must win to cement its ambition of becoming the world’s dominant off-road performance brand.
“If you want to be the Porsche of off-road, you’ve got to win Dakar,” Mr Farley told CarExpert at the 2026 Dakar Rally, which he visited along with the company’s COO Kumar Galhotra, racing director Mark Rushbrook and the general manager of Ford Racing, Will Ford (the son of Bill Ford).
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Mr Farley made it clear that the brutal 14-day cross-desert endurance event, which these days is held in Saudi Arabia, is no longer just part of Ford’s motorsport calendar, but a central piece of a product development program that aims to dominate the production off-road vehicle market.
In the 1960s, Ford’s famous victory over Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 Hour endurance classic reshaped the company’s global reputation and proved it could beat the best in the world on their own terms.
Mr Farley believes Dakar offers a modern parallel – an off-road race so punishing and unforgiving that winning it delivers the type of credibility no marketing campaign ever could.
“There’s no race like Dakar,” he said on the sidelines – or the desert dunes – of the 2026 event, which has eight top-flight Raptor T1+ machines gunning 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.
Mr Farley, who spent 25 years at Toyota earlier in his career, described the prospect of beating the Japanese giant at Dakar as “a spiritual moment”, likening 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 arena, and helped it become the world’s biggest automaker.
But Ford is determined to topple it off-road and the intensity of that rivalry helps explain the bluntness of Mr Farley’s language around Dakar.
“We’re a stone-cold killer team,” he said. “And we’re going to win this f@#%in’ race.”
But the stakes go way beyond bragging rights. Mr Farley has been explicit 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 emotional core of the brand.
Winning Dakar, he argues, validates the durability, suspension and powertrain philosophies Ford wants customers to experience in vehicles they can buy for the road – and just about anywhere off-road.
“We want to win Dakar because it’s good for our business,” he said. “This isn’t marketing – this is what we do.”
That thinking reflects a deeper shift in how Ford approaches motorsport. Under Mr Farley, racing is no longer treated as a promotional expense, but a frontline engineering operation.
Dakar, with its thousands of kilometres of punishment, has become a rolling laboratory for long-term suspension validation, vehicle durability and real-world reliability – areas that Mr Farley suggests matter more to customers than lap times or peak horsepower.
It’s also why Dakar now sits at the top of Ford’s motorsport hierarchy, alongside Le Mans and a return to Formula 1, as the company eyes an unprecedented push across all three racing arenas.
For Ford, though, Dakar carries unique weight. It’s the race that proves whether Ford can truly claim leadership in off-road performance – not just via branding or nostalgia, but through engineering and execution under the harshest conditions imaginable.
And if Ford does succeed, the significance won’t be lost on its CEO. 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-day moment of motorsport history.
At the mid-way point of the 14-day 2026 Dakar Rally, Ford’s four factory-back drivers all sat inside the top 10, albeit minutes behind the leader. After yesterday’s seventh stage, Ford was positioned in second, third, fifth and seventh.
Crucially, the brand is leading its Toyota rivals. However, sitting out front is five-times Dakar winner Nasser Al Attiyah in a Dacia.