Toyota’s hopes of winning the 2026 Dakar Rally came to an end on Thursday when Henk Lategan suffered a wheel bearing failure. With the highest running Toyota after Friday’s action being Toby Price in a distant eighth, 2026 is shaping up to be the Hilux’s first time finishing outside the overall podium since 2017.

Glyn Hall, the mastermind behind the Toyota GR DKR Hilux, is proud of the effort that Toyota Gazoo Racing put in to get the new Hilux out on track. Of course, that pride does come with disappointment for him and the team about the result.

“When we look back of what’s been achieved in these few months, designing a whole new car, putting the team back together, and all the manufacturing and then very little testing time, I think it’s incredible,” Hall said.

2026 marked the introduction of a new Hilux by TGR’s European branch in partnership with Overdrive Racing. Hall was one of the lead designers for its predecessor, which was built in his native South Africa as part of his company Hallspeed. Hallspeed was sold to Shameer Variawa in 2023 and became SVR, which continues to build the Hilux for TGR South Africa for those like his son Saood. Lategan was also part of TGRSA before joining the flagship team in Europe last year.

Hall was brought in by TGR as a technical consultant on the 2026 Hilux, which features upgrades like technology from the HySE project and being wider than the previous model so that it could better compete against other T1+ cars. Team sporting director Jean-Marc Fortin had been blunt about tempering expectations, saying last July that 2026 will be more of a learning year before the “revolution” begins in 2027 or 2028.

Even then, the new Hilux has proven to be a capable and competitive machine. It has won Stages 2 (Seth Quintero), 4 (Lategan), and 8 (Variawa) while Lategan traded blows with Ford and Dacia for the overall until his mechanical issues in Stage 11.

Hall commended the fight that Lategan and navigator Brett Cummings “have managed as crews over the few days with everything that’s been thrown at them. We went from leading the two days to maybe going too slowly into the marathon day, then catching up, leading again mid-stage and then the damper failure. I mean, the list goes on and on.

“You could easily find a 40-minute difference where we could have been here today that much down the road, but that is motorsport. ‘What if’ and ‘could have been’ doesn’t apply here at all. This is pure engineering and when things break, there’s a reason for it.

“We’ll find that out and try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But obviously right now, the whole team is feeling the pain.”

Price, making his debut for TGR, sits eighth overall after Stage 12 ahead of Quintero in ninth. The former is nearly 58 and a half minutes behind current leader Nasser Al-Attiyah, himself a former TGR driver, with one day to go.

Featred image credit: Florent Gooden / DPPI / ASO