It seems like the FIA has some sort of silly penalty each Dakar Rally. In 2023, there was Carlos Sainz Jr. being investigated for closing his dad’s car door. A year after that, drivers were receiving suspended disqualifications because they didn’t wear an approved wristwatch. At last year’s race, nobody was putting their cellphones in the sealed pouches. Rules are rules and everyone is expected to follow them, but it is odd when you start seeing repeat cases.

In 2026’s case, the recurring theme appears to be seatbelts.

During the first three stages alone, the FIA stewards handed out five time penalties for navigators not wearing their seatbelts properly while their cars were in motion. Akira Miura in particular got penalized twice, while Brock Heger lost the SSV overall lead because of over 11 minutes for it.

Now that the race has reached the halfway point and its rest day, Jan Seinen and his board have been busy as ever tracking and cracking down on additional violators.

As luck would have it, Miura’s navigator Jean-Michel Polato committed the error again in Stage 4: he started to take his seatbelt off as Miura was slowing down but the Land Cruiser had yet to fully stop. This process took ten seconds which would ordinarily be a 100-second penalty, but the FIA doubled it to 200 as repeat offenders.

Francisco López Contardo’s chances at the SSV overall are slim after a tough start to the race, though 490 seconds of penalties doesn’t help either. On four occasions in Stage 3, he and navigator Álvaro León were busted for taking their seatbelts off before their Maverick came to a complete stop, leading to 390 seconds being added. López was also spotted with the zipper on his firesuit down, drawing a €250 fine. León made the same mistake the next day which got him another 100 seconds.

Dania Akeel got 30 seconds in Stage 4 for Sébastien Delaunay unfastening his belt before stopping. It certainly could be worse, especially since they had already received a 10:50 penalty in Stage 2 because they unsuccessfully tried to bring their loose wheel with them.

Victims of Navigator Seatbelt Syndrome in the Ultimate class include Cristina Gutiérrez (30 seconds) and Saood Variawa (50 seconds) in Stage 3, and Eryk Goczał (20 seconds) in Stage 4.

Of course, seatbelts weren’t the only thing Seinen had to investigate.

Olivier Pernaut (SS3) and Xu Benyang (SS5) each received a one-hour penalty for speeding thrice and driving backward on the course. Both teams had the same explanation: they missed a waypoint and went back to validate it while the GPS indicated they were going at legal speed. They both also admitted they didn’t know going in reverse was barred.

Xu’s JJ Sport teammate Fan Gaoxiang got 30 seconds for exceeding the 30 mBars/second turbo boost limit in Stage 6. Their other JJ3 colleague Tao Yongming had also gotten one hour for nerfing Pau Navarro on the second stage.

While busy with penalties, the FIA granted some leniency as well. Nani Roma had his 70-second speeding penalty from Stage 5 canceled after he explained his main navigation tablet had glitched out; the backup tablet recorded a different speed that led to the penalty, but it did not flag him as going too fast while speeding penalties can only be applied on the original system.

Seinen also agreed to tweak Hervé Guillaume’s SS4 time because he had arrived very late at the neutralization zone due to a mechanical issue, but was fed the wrong info on how to notify the FIA which led to him being marked down as a retirement. While he was still classified as finishing 34th in Challenger for the day, his stage time went from 42:30:00 to 11:41:13.

Featured image credit: Antonin Vincent / DPPI / ASO