Sara Price is unstoppable. She has learned to be, because getting to where she is now — in the driver’s seat of the fearsome Defender D7X-R, racing for the Defender factory team in its maiden Dakar campaign — has been a strange and winding road.
But it’s like she says: “There’s going to be a bad day. And in Dakar, you are only as good as your worst day.” On those bad days, Price seems to be at her best.
She and her navigator, Sean Berriman, finished second in-class at the grueling 2026 Dakar Rally. Defender teammates Rokas Baciuška and Oriol Vidal took the class win while Stéphane Peterhansel with Mika Metge finished fourth. Defender’s remarkable 1-2-4 sweep in the “Stock” class for production-based vehicles was made all the more remarkable by the fact it was the team’s first Dakar Rally.
Okay, sure, there were only seven vehicles racing in the Stock class. Defender’s three-car squad was the only factory team among them. But don’t forget this is a famously tough, sometimes deadly race in which making it to the finish line is considered a victory for any rookie. To get a class win first time out for a new team, driving a new car, is impressive.
Price has nothing but praise for her Defender teammates, support crews, and the car. But even now she’s still pushing. “Even at the top of the game, being able to compete for the wins, I still always want to become better,” says Price over a video call.
“That’s the ultimate goal: I want to win Dakar, plain and simple. No gray area. Dakar, I want to win it. That is my MO.” Like I said: unstoppable.
Motocross Dreams
“Evolve and adapt,” is something like a motto for Sara Price. “Racing Dakar, or with rally, with endurance racing, desert racing, that’s exactly what you have to do: evolve and adapt. I always make a plan for the plan to not go to plan. We need to be ready for absolutely anything.”
Nothing in her motorsport career has gone exactly to plan. She was forced to evolve and adapt very early on, when her childhood dream was ripped away just as she’d finally managed to grasp it.
“Motorsport entered my life, I would say, at birth,” she laughs. She was raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire — the epicentre of West Coast motocross — with a father deep into the off-road scene. “I was a dune baby,” she says. As a child, summers meant going to the river with her family. Winters meant the desert, specifically Glamis, the vast expanse of dunes near the Mexican border where the Californian off-road scene took off.
“Glamis is such a lifestyle for us,” she says. “We go out in our UTVs and our off-road vehicles for fun every weekend.” In the Inland Empire racing dirt bikes was a perfectly normal thing for a kid to do.
By the time Price was old enough to know what a career was, she’d already chosen one: professional motocross racer. That meant a life on the road, going from race to race, training and riding every day. A homeschooling teacher travelled with her. “It was crazy,” she admits. “It was a full Olympian-style program at a really young age.”
The day she graduated high school she was racing at Loretta Lynn’s, the Amateur National Motocross Championship. (She won Loretta Lynn’s, of course, and has the huge trophy on a shelf behind her to prove it.)
She turned pro at her home track, Glen Helen Raceway, the day she turned 16, and within a few years she’d reached the apex of women’s motocross. Monster Energy Kawasaki signed her as their first-ever factory-supported female racer in 2010. She also somehow found time to medal in Women’s Super-X at the X Games.
And then it all came crashing down.
“I was doing everything I could to make it in motocross,” she says. But then the women’s pro motocross series kind of imploded when TV coverage suddenly stopped. The sponsorships dried up. “We didn’t have the money coming in. As a little kid, you think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but there really isn’t,” Price says.
She was 18 years old and everything she’d been working toward her whole life was over. Speaking with her, you can feel this incident still stings. It wasn’t fair. There was television coverage and sponsorship money to keep the men’s pro motocross series going, of course.
“My parents were like, ‘Listen, we thought there would be more of a future for you doing this, but it turns out it’s not in the cards. We’ve gotta pivot. We’ve gotta figure something else out.’” So she did.
She had shoulder surgery. She entered a beauty pageant — partly, she explains, to prove she was marketable in a sport that didn’t yet know what to do with her — and won it. She started a car-painting business.
“Going through all that, it was hard at the time, but now I always know: evolve and adapt,” she says.
Stunt Driving to Dakar
One day a call comes in from a friend. “He’s like, ‘Hey, I need two badass girls on motorcycles, and it’s for a friend who does these big commercials during the Super Bowl.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m free I’ll come and ride a motorcycle.’ So I showed up and it ended up being a huge stunt job.” That first gig got her into the SAG-AFTRA union as a stunt professional, which is almost unheard of.
A few weeks later, walking to the mailbox with her mom, she pulled out a fistful of cheques. Her mom was laughing, guessing they’d each be worth twenty cents. “It ended up being five to 10 grand. I’d never seen that money in my life! I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I need to do stunts. This is my life now.’” Evolve and adapt.
Since that first stunt gig, Price has been a stunt double for Jason Statham and Emma Roberts, as well as for Lady Gaga in the John Wayne music video, and Karen Gillan in the film Jumanji: The Next Level. Her commercial credits include work for everything from Apple and Nokia to Ford, Honda and Toyota.
Stunt work bought her first house. It also bought her a side-by-side. And the side-by-side brought her back into professional racing.
A look at her CV shows that four-wheel racing clearly suited Price. She raced everything, from King of the Hammers rock crawling, to side-by-sides, to Stadium Super Trucks and Trophy Trucks, in all kinds of series big and small. In took a few years of rising through the ranks, but the victories began to stack up. Price won the Sonora Rally, and took class victories at prestigious desert races including the Mint 400, NORRA 1000, and Baja 500 to name just a few.
In 2023, she went all-in on the 2024 Dakar Rally. “I put every cent in my bank account into that program. I was just betting on myself,” she says.
It paid off. At her Dakar debut in 2024, Price won a stage, becoming the first American woman to do so. She finished the rally as the first rookie in the side-by-side class, where she finished fourth overall. The next year she went back to Dakar and took three stage wins.
Price’s big bet also caught Defender’s eye. The timing was perfect. The British SUV maker was putting together its first factory Dakar team.
“It was funny, because it was kind of through the grapevine,” Price remembers about first hearing of the Defender program. “I first got a Facebook message, and I never check my Facebook messages. Thank goodness I actually did,” she laughs. She took the meeting and remembers, “I just was like, ‘this is everything I’ve been wishing and hoping for for a very long time.”
It was a second shot at her original dream of being a professional racer, albeit on four wheels rather than two.
Being part of a factory team changes everything. Through most of her career, Price explains, it was always a grind to fund the next race. “It all came down to money, and I worked so hard to always get that money, but it gets exhausting. As an athlete, you want to be able to focus on your job and on performing. I wasn’t able to do that very often, because I was so consumed with trying to just get there,” she explains.
Now, finally, Price can focus on performance, on winning. “Being supported by the best team there is, it’s been just an incredible experience. Everyone is so amazing. You don’t get this kind of vibe often. Everyone just wants the same thing. We all want to do well, we want to have a good time. It’s pretty cool.”
The purpose-built D7X-R she races is, in her words, “absolutely insane, one of the most fun cars I’ve ever driven.” Built on the production Defender OCTA, it retains the road-going SUV’s basic architecture and its 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 engine. “People ask me, ‘Is it actually fast?’” she says, “and I’m like, you have no idea. If we could get everyone in the seat of it, they’d be blown away. It puts you back in your seat.”
The only major changes to the showroom-fresh OCTA are a sequential gearbox, FIA-mandated safety gear, 35-inch BFGoodrich tires, an enormous 550-litre fuel cell, and a swap from air suspension to metal springs and dampers. (Legendary U.K. rally specialists Prodrive are responsible for getting the OCTA race ready, so you know the build is clean enough to eat off.)
“If I was a part of Defender or not, the OCTA is my dream car,” she admits.
Defender’s First Dakar
Despite the professionalism of the team, and the capability of the D7X-R, the team’s first Dakar was no cakewalk.
On good days, she’s in the car for eight to 12 hours. “If you have a bad day, you could be in the car for days,” she explains. On day one, Price’s car broke a lower control arm and didn’t have a spare onboard. It cost her a lot of time.
Later in the rally, which covered thousands of kilometres of Saudi Arabian desert, Price’s car got caught in a Witch’s Eye. It’s a hidden vortex in a sand dune, a gaping hole that typically forms just over a dune’s crest. She’d just summited a 20-story sand dune when her car got stuck in a huge Witch’s Eye. Her Defender teammate Stéphane Peterhansel — aka “Mr. Dakar,” a 14-time champion — was behind Price and got stuck in the same spot. The problem was all the other competitors were still coming up behind them, charging up this dune at full throttle, but they couldn’t see the trapped Defenders.
“We’re running around trying to get our cars out and trying to not get hit,” Price remembers. They were waving other racers off but still had a few close calls. Then the worst happened: “One of those big trucks in the race came in and smashed into the back of Stéphane’s car because they had no choice. They couldn’t let up,” Price remembers. Lucky nobody was hurt, and they did eventually manage to continue. “Yeah, that was a pretty hairy one,” she says, shrugging off a deadly situation the way the rest of us might shrug off a bad meal.
But, on her worst days, she’s at her best. “My arm could be falling off, and I won’t give up,” Price says. “The surface-level stuff is where I struggle. But when it gets deep, that’s where I excel.”
She’s unstoppable. “I want to win Dakar,” she says. And the smart money wouldn’t bet against Sara Price.
