Husqvarna

“Finally, the dream has come true. In all I’ve won 10 stages this year and to finish like this is incredible. Battling with Toby on the last day and opening the piste in the dunes gives this W2RC championship a special flavour. When I started in this sport I was really a long way from the level of the top guys, but I learnt that in rally raid you need to know how to adapt to the situation and never give up. I couldn’t feel happier than right now – an amazing feeling.”

Maturity is the name of the game. At 27 years of age, Luciano Benavides is sure to have reached it after this first world rally-raid championship, consolidated in the Husqvarna Factory Racing team that seems to be stronger than ever. Last January - after losing almost an hour on the opening stage - he felt he had ridden his best Dakar, with his worst result, P13. In Abu Dhabi, he won his first stage victory in a world championship, something he had been targeting for a long time and which he finally did. Even with that win, the 9th place finish was not brilliant due to some mistakes in opening the stage for three days. However, that was the turning point of the race. It marked a change in his performance and confidence in his decision-making. Then came the 1-2 for the "Husqy" team in Morocco behind his teammate Skyler Howes and the podium in Andalusia, to which must be added, the Atacama Rally podium. Such a boost gives him enormous confidence to tackle the next Dakar with a bike that gives him total security, which was tested extensively last November in training sessions in the United States. How did the youngest of the Benavides brothers begin his association with the big race? Luciano first encountered the Dakar at 13 years of age, when he went to see the caravan pass through Fiambalá in northern Argentina, never imagining he would be on the start line a decade later.  His debut on the 2018 Dakar ended in retirement after a hard fall on the Salta-Belén stage when he was 15th in the general classification. In the 2019 Peruvian Dakar, he made it into the top ten by finishing 9th. In 2020 in Saudi Arabia, he obtained his best result: a remarkable 6th place, being the best Argentinean of the event. He had just transferred from the KTM team to Husqvarna for the 2021 Dakar. A fall on stage nine, when he was 10th overalls, severely injured his shoulder and led to his retirement. The victory of his brother Kevin turned that disappointment into a massive family joy. Coming back to the present, Luciano Benavides sees himself as a different rider. With a different maturity. He heads to the Dakar, expected to be "the hardest" at his best and that of Husqvarna. His dream, he admits, "is to be on the podium of the Dakar and to win it, but everything takes time". Luciano is out to prove that time has come.