Sara Price Joins Defender Rally for Dakar 2026

Sara Price’s journey started in southern California. At only eight years old, she began competing on off-road motorcycles, spending weekends throwing up dust and racing towards the sunset. Before reaching her late teens, she had collected 19 national motocross championships. After turning professional, she became an X-Games medallist in motocross, and her already soaring career accelerated still further.

In 2019, Price moved to four wheels and became the first woman to contest the famously punishing Baja 1000 alone for the full 19-hour race. She finished second in the Trophy Truck class, took the overall championship and gained official Ironwoman status. It is the off-road racing equivalent of completing an ultramarathon in a sandstorm - solo, largely after dark.

She was also the first woman ever to race in Stadium Supertrucks, has won an Extreme E race, and works as a Hollywood stunt rider and driver. In 2024, she made her Dakar Rally debut and became the first American woman - and only the third woman in history - to win a Dakar Rally stage amid the vast sands of Al-Ula. She placed fourth overall and claimed the best rookie title.

Sara Price joins Defender Rally for Dakar 2026

Price has now joined Defender Rally as part of its star-studded driver line-up for the 2026 Dakar. As the rally preparations gather pace, she is playing a key role in the demanding test programme for the Defender Dakar D7X-R, helping refine its set-up for the toughest off-road race in the world.

“To join the works Defender team is a huge honour. Defender is an iconic vehicle with extreme capabilities, as well as a brand fuelled by purpose, so to drive for this British adventure brand at such a huge moment in its history is an amazing accomplishment for me.”

Alongside Sara will be co-driver Sean Berriman, a Dakar champion in his own right as a co-driver in the SSV (side-by-side vehicle) class. The pair already know how to work together, having partnered for Dakar during the 2025 event. Over two punishing weeks, they built a genuine partnership through timed stages of up to 500 miles, with very little sleep.

Sean Berriman’s Dakar co-driver role

Although Berriman will not be at the wheel, the role of a ‘co-driver’ carries more weight at Dakar than in any other rally. In addition to navigating more than 6,000 miles of wilderness, maintaining the correct route and identifying the quickest lines, he will manage timekeeping, strategy and constantly changing conditions. He must be part mathematician, part psychologist and part survival expert, keeping the Defender in contention for the finish.

“It’s a privilege to be competing at Dakar 2026 and to tackle the dunes again with Sara,” he says. “Defender’s ethos of embracing the impossible will help push us to maximise on the successes we achieved in 2025’s SSV category. The Stock category better be ready.”

With Price’s formidable off-road racing credentials and Berriman’s standing as one of the sport’s finest co-drivers, the duo has every chance of making Defender’s Dakar debut a victorious one. That is certainly the plan being led by Ian James, Team Principal of Defender Rally and Managing Director of JLR Motorsport.

“We couldn’t be happier to have secured such a formidable talent in Sara” he says. “With trailblazing achievements to her name already, including Dakar stage wins, coupled with her determination and passion for the sport, she’s a perfect fit for Defender. She’s earned this opportunity”.

For Sara, Dakar 2026 is more than simply another race. It offers an opportunity to place her name in Defender’s story and in the history books of desert racing. The opposition is fierce, the landscape unforgiving and the momentum relentless - but so is she. “I’m a born racer,” she says. With that attitude, who would choose to stand in her way?

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