Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Enter this universe, and it doesn’t take all that much time to know that you’re somewhere special.
Of course, the surroundings themselves are unique, impossibly exotic to most North Americans – desert for miles, a landscape dotted with small communities inhabiting concrete homes rarely larger than a single storey, but with large, modern and glassy cities popping up seemingly out of nowhere.
This is central Saudi Arabia outside the Capital of Riyadh and while not at sea level, it’s still a desert and there’s plenty of space for urban sprawl the likes of which you’d see in Phoenix or even Los Angeles.
In fact, if you fly in at night – as I did – it almost looks like LA; lots of lights and mainly a grid-style format. Add neon signs with names familiar to Westerners - McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC - and it looks a little like LA from the ground, too, except with Arabic signage.
I’m here for two main reasons: to test out the tweaked 2026 Defender 110 in similar conditions to those in which it gets developed, and to experience the 2026 Dakar Rally, in which Defender has a factory-backed three-truck race team for the first time.
A first for Defender
The first time, really? Well yes, because while over the Dakar’s 48-year history, Defenders and Range Rovers have competed successfully in all three Dakar locations (Paris-Dakar, through west-central South America and now, Saudi Arabia), those were always private efforts. This year, it’s Defender money that’s putting the Defender D7X-R race cars on the track, and the mechanics in the bivouac.
The D7X-R race truck may seem at first blush like a far cry from the standard 110 we’d be piloting, but it runs in the Production class in the rally. And that means it isn’t as far removed from the 110’s V8-powered OCTA sibling as you might think.
In order to run in the Production class, as Defender is doing, Land Rover has to use the same engine as the OCTA (a 4.4L twin-turbo V8 shared with BMW), the same 8-speed transmission and, same unibody construction. Even the bumpers have to be the same, although you are allowed to modify them from stock. Defender has done so for the D7X-R, cutting the edges down and changing the radiator to a larger centre-mounted unit.
The twist is that the team can’t travel with bumpers that have been modified as such; they can carry replacements, but only in stock form. And so, at the Dakar race HQ complex, the so-called bivouac, where each team has a spot, the bumpers are modified on-site. Their garage consists of three tents and four trucks; mostly they’re for spare parts and tools, but one serves as a medical/physio clinic.
Why a clinic? Well, because drivers and their navigators will be driving up to 450 km a day for 14 days and 8,000 km in punishing off-road conditions, so they need to be taken care of. As do the mechanics, who will often be working through the night, repairing, refueling and sometimes rebuilding the racers.
Like NORAD for race cars
Another trailer serves as the team’s brain trust. Banks of computers to monitor each car’s progress on the 100 km-plus stages, satellite phones, probably a Starlink hookup or two. It’s like NORAD for race cars, and it’s incredible.
For the transition to D7X-R spec, the standard OCTA’s 6D adaptive suspension was replaced with a Bilstein Blackhawk set-up at each corner; there are 35-inch BF Goodrich off-road tires and of course much of the cockpit is upgraded. You have your typical Motec dash, racing bucket seats and roll cage up front.
The rear is where it really starts to deviate from stock, thanks to a 550-litre fuel tank replacing the back seats, plus the roll cage that doubles as a mount for up to three spare tires (three per vehicle per stage is max, but if one of the cars has bad luck, they may be able to snag an extra tire from their teammates if the stars align). There are also air guns, suspension arms and track rods, because sometimes there are repairs carried out while out on a stage.
One of the D7X-Rs, car #504 driven by Sara Price - who would eventually finish second in class, narrowly missing becoming only the second woman to ever win at Dakar - has a mechanic as a co-driver in Sean Berriman.
Otherwise, a call can be made to one of the T5 support trucks and a team of mechanics, with more spare parts. If that doesn’t work and you have to get towed back to the bivouac, you’re looking at a 24-hour stage penalty. Now, in a class with seven trucks like this year’s Production class, that can be overcome. However, if you’re competing in one of the 70-car classes like Score or Prototype which are dedicated racers, that time penalty is likely too serious to overcome.
The scene at the bivouac – even when the racers are out on the course – is a bustling one. Parts moving to and fro, mechanics cleaning and modifying parts, others ensuring that everything is organized and ready for when the racers do return. And when they do, sometimes it means a whole night’s work to be ready for the next day.
There’s more, in case that all wasn’t challenging enough. On some so-called Marathon stages, the vehicles don’t return to the bivouac at all, but to a satellite campsite out on the course, and communication is sparse. Reception issues are common, plus there are restrictions placed by the FIA and ASO governing bodies on how many calls teams can make to the HQ truck, and how long they can speak with each call. It’s wild, wild stuff.
For Defender, however, it’s a great test of what their road cars are capable of. “If we’re going to [go racing} with the Defender, then we have to go to the top,” said Jack Lambert, Technical Integration Manager at JLR Motorsport. “This isn’t circuit racing; we don’t know were we’re going. It’s a good place for us to demonstrate the robustness and durability of the road car.”
Indeed, to watch these very familiar-looking OCTAs bounce their way toward the flying finish at the end of stage 3 is a sight to behold. Exhaust pipes bang-bang-banging away on the overrun, throttle being blipped, then dropped, blipped, then dropped to maintain both forward progress and traction, and of course the air time encountered over almost every bump – it’s all there and the fury you can sense just from this quick encounter is endlessly palpable.
That’s on a relatively tame part of the course. Elsewhere, you can watch as a Prototype racer tries to climb a 40-degree sandbank in order to reach a checkpoint (those are radar beacons and while the desert is vast, they have a certain radius in which to pass by, or risk being penalized).
And you can watch as Defender driver Stéphane Peterhansel – with 14 overall Dakar victories across both the car and bike disciplines – rolls his Defender #500 in a ravine, spends 30 minutes righting it again, and get back on his way.
And you can watch as a T5 truck driver stops, hops out, helps a moto rider get his bike moving again, and hops back in. It’s not a race for the faint of heart.
About those T5 trucks
Speaking of exceptional: about those T5 trucks. The two- or three-axle behemoths may either be actually competing in the race, or serving as mobile garages for the teams. Some teams have their own, others have to “rent” a truck for a time if they want a bit of extra help. On occasion, since sportsmanship is a big part of what goes on here, one team’s truck may try and help another team’s racer, especially if they’re in a different class.
With all this going on, it’s easy to forget that the trucks have to traverse much of the same adverse surfaces that the racers do, and that they can do so seems almost like an engineering miracle akin to how an Airbus A380 is actually able to get off the ground.
This was all wonderful to take in, but eventually it becomes hard not to want to experience it more directly, especially when there’s a fleet of Defender 110 models – with Dakar stickers and all! – just waiting to be used.
And so, we’d take to the desert, often driving on the exact same pistes the racers had covered days – or even hours – earlier.
First, though, we had to get from the bivouac to the trailhead – and we weren’t the only ones trying to do so. Because this is a staged rally, competitors have to get themselves from their HQ to the start line, which means we were literally sharing the road with race cars, bikes and trucks.
It’s an uncanny thing to see a Red Bull-liveried Ford prototype race come up through your digital rear-view mirror and then trundle by. The Saudi Arabian state police cruisers (I think that’s what they were) stationed every km or so along our path was further proof this was not your ordinary morning rush hour.
The 2026 Defender
For ’26, the Defender gets some slight design updates – different head and taillight detailing, different hood inserts and a new Woodstone Green exterior colour – as well as a larger 13-inch central infotainment display, but it’s definitely an evolution.
Under the hood is a 3.0L turbocharged 6-cylinder with a 48V mild hybrid system. That helps smooth power delivery between shifts of the 8-speed automatic transmission, as well as a boost from stop. Power is rated at 395 hp and 406 lb-ft of torque, the kind of power you need when climbing deep sand dunes.
Even without the more off-road centric tires and special 6D suspension found on the OCTA, the 110s we had were full value for the task at hand. The 110 still has adjustable suspension lift as well as numerous off-road modes including a Sand mode as well as locking differentials. All of those combined to help us climb sand banks that not even every Dakar racer could fully crest.
The human factor
The tools, of course, can only take you so far; the rest is up to the driver. It’s a fun balance of inputting enough throttle to ensure the Defender stays atop the sand without sinking in, but not so much so as to lose control.
When climbing slowly you also need to find that balance because if you happen to get a little stuck in, too much throttle will just make things worse, like struggling in quicksand. It’s a delicate balance, but done right, the modern Defender is just as capable as those purpose-built-for-farmers Series I and II trucks of old.
Thrilling as climbing mountains of sand is, I really started to capture my groove on the faster portions.
Since the racers had just passed through, their tire grooves remained so that the fast bits essentially had a racing line carved right into them. At that point, you find yourself looking for the entries, apexes and exits and choosing your line as if on a traditional racetrack. The Defender also allows you to steer with the rear end and the throttle, tossing the tail out in little drifts here and there to really accomplish that desert runner feel.
Even though I had spent over 100 km on the off road, I was sad to see the tarmac eventually return. It was just so normal, so everyday at that point and I felt like these Defenders had even more to give off the beaten track. It was not to be, but it provided a clear window into just what the Defender platform is capable of.
OCTA
If the 110s impressed on our drive, the OCTA name shone as the Dakar Rally itself came to close. The very OCTA-y D7X-Rs finished first, second and fourth in class. It was a fitting end to the brand’s first factory-backed foray into the world of long-distance rally, and a great start to the five-race 2026 World Rally-Raid Championship. Yes, all three trucks will again be present when the championship makes the jump to Portugal in March.
