Dakar Rally 2025 Results: Back-to-back wins for Benavides on Stage 9

2025 Dakar Rally stage nine results where Red Bull KTM’s Luciano takes rare back-to-back win as teammate Daniels Sanders extends his lead and nearest rival, Monster Energy Honda’s Tosha Schareina, has a big one.

2024 Dakar Rally Stage 9 in a nutshell – Riyadh > Haradh Special: 357km Liaison: 232km in the Eastern Province heading towards the Qatar and Abu Dhabi borders.

There’s an old saying about buses, which could be a British thing but we hope you understand when we say, “you wait for ages and then two come along at once.”
Stage wins are like that for both Luciano Benavides and KTM who’ve suffered a draught in recent years at Dakar thanks to Honda’s ascension and partly due to the Austrian manufacturer’s diluted colours of orange, white and red.
Things have changed in 2025 with the focus solely on the orange bikes, a smaller team and a change in fortunes to amass seven stage wins now (including the prologue). The organiser’s notes today pointed out the last time KTM collected as many was in 2018.
Rarer still is for one rider to tick-off two stages on the bounce and that was down to Luciano’s impressive day leading out front.
Despite losing time to those chasing he was never caught and therefore was the only rider to amass time bonuses, 4m51s, which made all the difference.
It was a ride which also sees the fourth placed rider closing in on a podium overall. Both Luciano and Van Beveren (third overall and second on stage nine) are getting stronger as the rally nears its conclusion.
By the form book race leader Daniel Sanders should have been on for the win today but the Australian clocked just a few too many mistakes towards the end of the stage and dropped just over three minutes on his teammate.
Importantly for the overall standings, Sanders lost no time on his nearest rival Tosha Schareina who finished seventh and almost seven minutes off the stage fastest time. Sanders’ lead extends back out to just under 15 minutes again.
In fairness to the Spaniard, this classic rally bike swap-out crash did not help him one little bit…

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The Honda rider is not the first to have this common kind of get-off on the rally bikes. In this edition of the Dakar, which now sees just 10 riders remaining in the GP category, riders who have crashed in a similar fashion include Ross Branch, Pablo Quintanilla and Bradley Cox.
Rally 2 leader Edgar Canet seems to have things sewn up and is able to concentrate on simply getting to the finish, now just three days away. The problem his rivals have is not just the speed of the 19-year-old in his first Dakar, but also none of them seems able to strong a consistent challenge. The records will show different riders each day challenging the young Spaniard closest – today that was Mathieu Doveze who finished ninth scratch behind Canet.