Danske Gas supplies fuel for the 2026 Dakar Rally

The Dakar Rally opens the season of the FIA World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC). This year’s route started for the first time from Yanbu, a port on the Red Sea, and ended there too: a prologue and thirteen stages through Al-Ula, Ha’il, Riyadh – with a rest day – Wadi ad-Dawasir, Bisha and Al-Henakiyah, and back to the sea. Close to eight thousand kilometres, of which 4,840 were timed. Twice the crews drove a marathon stage, without service assistance at the bivouac. Thirty-five crews started in the Ultimate class, the top car category.

Energylandia Rally Team is the team of the Goczał family from Zator: Marek Goczał with his son Eryk and his brother Michał. The team has competed in the Dakar since 2021; Eryk joined in 2023 and on his debut set a Guinness record – at the age of eighteen years and seventy days he won the SSV class as the youngest class winner in the history of the Dakar. The 2026 edition was the first Dakar in the Ultimate class for all three, in Toyota Hilux cars. Eryk Goczał drove with Szymon Gospodarczyk (number 205), Marek Goczał with Maciej Marton (206), and Michał Goczał with Diego Ortega (209).

On 13 January, on the ninth stage from Wadi ad-Dawasir to Bisha – 410 kilometres of special stage – Eryk Goczał and Szymon Gospodarczyk won by a margin of seven minutes. Michał Goczał and Diego Ortega were second, and Toby Price in a Toyota third. It was the first Polish one-two in the history of the Dakar in the car category. Twenty-one-year-old Eryk Goczał became the second Pole, after Krzysztof Hołowczyc, to win a Dakar stage in the car classification. A privateer team, in its first Dakar in Ultimate, was the fastest in the entire field that day.

All three crews reached the finish in Yanbu. Marek Goczał and Maciej Marton took thirteenth place, 1:37:27 behind the winner – the highest among the privateer crews of the rally. Eryk Goczał was seventeenth, Michał Goczał nineteenth. Eight times over the two weeks the team’s crews finished a stage in the top ten. The rally was won by Nasser Al-Attiyah and Fabian Lurquin in a Dacia Sandrider – Al-Attiyah’s sixth Dakar victory.

The fuel for the Dakar Rally was supplied to Energylandia Rally Team by Danske Gas. Rallying is a sport of logistics, and two weeks in the desert, with marathon stages without service, are the best proof of that.

We have been supplying the WRC since 2024, and in 2025 the fuel went to further rallies. The requirements for the fuel are the same regardless of whether a rally lasts three days or two weeks. Only the scenery changes – from the gravel roads of Masuria to the desert.