Sand blaster

He is one of only three people (the others being Stéphane Peterhansel and Hubert Auriol) to have won the Dakar both on a bike (KTM, 2004) and in a car (Mini, 2014). He has competed in every edition since 1996, except for 2023 when he was recovering from cancer. That he is tough and talented is in no doubt. However, I was recently told a story that sums up the unstoppable nature of the man: on the bike one year, he set out on a stage and at the first checkpoint was leading by 15 minutes. At the end of the stage he handed in his time card and was told he was half an hour down on the leader. Surely not. He began to remonstrate. This couldn’t be so. Then a marshal asked if Nani had seen the state of his helmet… Roma had crashed, been knocked out cold, woken up, seen the bike on its side and simply got back on. To him it had felt like a fairly seamless stream of events, but in fact he’d been lying in the desert unconscious for something like 45 minutes…

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is in the process of becoming soaking wet on Saturday afternoon as I clamber into Alex Haro’s co-driver’s seat in the new Raptor. With 400mm of ground clearance, it’s a long way up. I’m also quite a distance from Roma in the driver’s seat, separated by a sea of buttons and snaking cables. There is a small MoTec screen on the steering column with shift lights over the top and then a much larger screen in the middle, which has a world of telemetry, but which Roma says he leaves mostly on a page prominently displaying the tyre pressures. There will be even more screens in the finished article (this is the first proper test car) because the co-driver will need their own set.

An M-Sport engineer pops his head in to check Roma is happy with the adjustments they’ve made to the two, tall, thick levers to his right. He says it’s much better and the more bulbous grip on the gearlever is more to his liking. A twiddle of a small green switch and a chinwag about brake balance; he wants a bit more on the front – nearer 60:40 front to rear. It’s not a case of extracting the best braking performance up the hill today, rather he’s already got his head in the heat of the Empty Quarter, where you want to work the front stoppers harder as they get more natural cooling.

Then it’s time to go and there’s a surprise. As Roma presses the starter button the glorious sound of an angry octet of cylinders fills the cabin. One of the beauties of the Dakar is that there is a refreshing freedom in the regulations and while Audi went down one route – an electric powertrain with an onboard 2-litre petrol inline four as a generator – the Ford Performance Raptor goes down another route altogether, namely a Coyote-based 5-litre petrol V8. I suspect it will need every drop from the 500-litre fuel tank on some of the longer stages, but by golly it sounds good.

One other difference with the Raptor is its suspension. Have a poke around other top-line Dakar cars and you’ll generally find purple Reiger dampers in the arches. M-Sport has long used the Dutch company’s wares on its WRC cars, so the switch to Fox for the Raptor seems odd. However, chatting to Roma and the engineers, it seems that what was initially something requested by the marketing department at Ford (the regular Raptor road vehicles available to the public use Fox suspension) has actually turned out to be very promising. The American company has lots of experience with Baja events and trophy trucks and after initial misgivings from M-Sport, the Fox engineers won them round to the point where in a back-to-back test the drivers preferred the new kids’ dampers.

Roma seems intent on demonstrating as much of the 350mm of travel as possible as we brake hard into the first corner, but there’s delectable precision in the way the big Raptor dives. He apparently wasn’t entirely sure which way the course went during his morning run up the hill, but he seems to have got his bearings this time. Except… after a brief burst of bullish acceleration out of the second turn in front of the house he pulls the big handbrake, hard. I’ve been at the epicentre of a few doughnuts on the Duke’s drive, but this is something else. We’re backwards some way before the normally allotted pirouette location, the 2010kg behemoth skating across the wet tarmac, before there’s a roar from the V8 and all four 37-inch tyres scrabble for traction like an over-ambitious Great Dane on polished parquet. One clean 360 and we’re off again.

The 2.3-metre wide Raptor somehow fits twixt bales and flint wall, but I confess I breathe in. Then moments later we’re over the line, Roma’s grin is as broad as the grille and I’m laughing and hoping his efforts have persuaded a few more of the watching crowd to tune in to the Dakar Rally come January.

With Dacia (run by Prodrive) also joining Toyota, it should be quite the battle in the desert in 2025. Audi won’t be there to defend its title as the Four Rings refocuses on F1 (although reigning champion Carlos Sainz Snr will be, teaming up alongside Roma in another Raptor) but nonetheless it feels like the Dakar is gaining in popularity and more manufacturers are taking notice.

Mark Rushbrook, Ford Performance Motorsport’s Global Director, has said that the company loves the adventure, the spectacle and the sense of going where people perhaps think you can’t in a four-wheeled vehicle. In short, the rally is inspiring. Maybe in a few years’ time we will be looking at a golden era for the event in the same vein as Le Mans now. I certainly hope so.