Red Bull KTM Factory Racing's Luciano Benavides took his second and back-to-back stage victory today on stage nine of the 2025 Dakar Rally. The Argentinian captured the win after starting first, leading to all bonus points, and finishing ahead of his rivals on adjusted time to take the top spot 1:54 ahead of Monster Energy Honda HRC Rally's Adrian Van Beveren. KTM's front-runner Daniel Sanders finished third after the day's course was complete, 3:04 off the pace of Benavides.

In the overall rankings, Sanders continues his stranglehold on the race with an 14:45 gap on Honda's Tosha Schareina who had a nasty high-speed crash today. Schareina would re-mount his CRF450Rally and finish today's race in a strong seventh place, losing more than three minutes to Sanders in the overall rankings. Third place is all Van Beveren, sitting more than 20 minutes behind Sanders.

Benavides is benefitting from his late race surge and moved into fourth place in the general rankings, ahead of American's Ricky Brabec and Skyler Howes in fifth and sixth, respectively. Brabec is 31+ minutes out of the lead, and 10+ minutes away from the podium in Fifth. Howes is right behind him, eight minutes further away.

Tomorrow's Stage 10 puts competitors straight into a massive, brutal liason/transfer of over 500km before a short Empty Quarter sand dune stage of 115km. This will be a crucial stage in setting up the longer, penultimate stage 11 of the 2025 rally - really the last chance for anyone to make an attack.

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Dakar Rally Daily is produced and edited by Jesse Ziegler, and hosted by Quinn Cody and Jesse Ziegler.