Nathan Hayashi on Dakar: “Our goal is to bring more people here”, “build more race cars”

May 9, 2026

Compared to the T1+, T1.1, and T1.2 cars that raced the Dakar Rally in January, Nathan Hayashi’s Ford Bronco Raptor was an anomaly. While competing in Ultimate like those subcategories, it was classed instead in the very rarely seen T1.3 for vehicles that are also legal for SCORE International competition.

Of course, a car optimized for desert racing was not going to handle the tumults of rally raid the same as those meant for the latter discipline. Despite everything thrown at the Canadians, they successfully reached the finish 59th in Ultimate.

All in all, it was a pretty successful debut, one that Hayashi hopes to build upon.

“For us, we were just pushing to survive. Realistically, it’s just to get to the finish,” Hayashi explained in The Gear Shop’s newly released documentary Never Give Up!.

“This is the beginning. Our goal is to bring more people here. Our goal is to build more race cars and for us to have a very solid platform. This is the start.”

The Gear Shop raced the Bronco Raptor at the 2025 Sonora Rally before entering the Rallye du Maroc. Since the latter is an FIA-sanctioned event like Dakar, the federation had to dust the cobwebs off its T1.3 rulebook before giving the team clearance in the Ultimate class alongside everyone else rather than in Open. The car was moved to Open anyway after back-to-back stage retirements meant it couldn’t continue as an FIA entry.

Dakar, of course, proved to be a challenge for what is basically a showroom vehicle; all the team added were a larger fuel tank, a roll cage, and mandatory safety measures, but it was otherwise little different from the production Bronco Raptor. Never Give Up! gives daily recaps of the team’s trials as well as other content like discussing their friendship with 2006 Dakar winner Luc Alphand, whom they met at the Rallye du Maroc; Hayashi, a former skier, also equated the Dakar effort to being an inverse of the 1993 film Cool Runnings by going from snowy Canada to the Saudi deserts.