Desert Dominance: How Polaris Pulled Off a SXS Win at Dakar

British writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger described the wastelands of Saudi Arabia as “a desert within a desert, so enormous and so desolate that the Arabs call it the Rub’al-Khali, or ‘The Empty Quarter.’” A continuous stretch of sand the size of France where dunes loom 700 feet above the rocky desert floor, trailing shadows down their backs like velveteen capes across the scorched earth.

Let’s take a moment to put that into perspective: 700 feet is roughly the height of New York’s MetLife Tower, or of “The Wall” in Game of Thrones according to George R.R. Martin. To understand this place is to understand something fundamental about the challenge of the Dakar Rally itself.

It’s here that racers made their final push this year for the most coveted championship in off-road racing. To stand on top of a Dakar podium is a lifetime achievement, and that’s just where Polaris Factory Racing driver Brock Heger and copilot Max Eddy wanted to be when I sat down with them before the start of this year’s race.

“Being professional athletes coming off an undefeated season down in Mexico, we’re carrying that same mindset over here.” said Eddy. “We didn’t come all the way over here for second place.”

Of the 432 vehicles that entered the 2025 Dakar Rally, less than half would ultimately survive the nearly 5,000-mile journey to the finish line. Heger and his Polaris Factory Racing RZR Pro R were just one of 51 teams in the highly competitive side-by-side class gunning for victory, and to make matters worse, this was Heger’s first-ever multi-day rally race.

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Against all odds, 14 days after our sit-down, Heger and Eddy would emerge from the dust to find themselves standing at the top of the podium as the winners of the side-by-side category. The Polaris Factory Racing team pulled off the most impressive SSV class victory in nearly a decade, putting a massive lead of over two hours between themselves and their closest competitor.

Here’s how it all came together.

Engineer, Build, Test, Refine

Everyone I spoke to around the Polaris camp was in agreement on one point: This win was an effort three years in the making. Three years is how long Brock and Max have been working with Polaris to mold the latest RZR Pro R into something that can handle 12 hours of non-stop abuse every day for two weeks straight.

“The Pro R is already so good stock, it’s so stout. The more stuff you change, the worse off you usually are because that’s the stuff that’s gonna break,” said Alex Scheuereel, Polaris’ director of motorsports. “We’ve tested the crap out of this car during development. There’s so much R&D behind the Pro R that it’s pretty much race spec off the showroom floor.”

All that effort is starting to pay some serious dividends. This season alone Polaris is coming off an undefeated podium sweep down in Mexico, with Brock himself taking top honors most recently at the prestigious Baja 1000 just a few months ago.

As proof of theory, over the course of the Dakar Brock and Max suffered little more than a few tire punctures along the way, which are all but unavoidable in desert racing. All the most important bits that simply have to work (engine, transmission, control arms, hubs, knuckles, trailing arms) did so without fail, and all of them were bone stock.

Brock and Max chalk much of this up to the simple fact that if it works down in Mexico, it’s going to work here on the Arabian Peninsula. The terrain and speeds that the car is built to handle down in Baja are much harder on the equipment than those in Saudi Arabia, which means the single greatest challenge of the rally was actually navigation.

Having never participated in a multi-day, map-book style rally before, Heger’s efforts leading up to the Dakar were almost entirely focused on learning the bare-bones style of navigating that’s unique to rally raids. As I’d find out later, the man came prepared.

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Eating the Elephant: Training for a Dakar Rally

While the terrain down in Mexico may be unforgiving, navigation is a comparatively simple affair. Teams in events like the Baja 1000 and San Felipe 250 essentially use point-to-point GPS systems, albeit a much more sophisticated version designed specifically for off-road racing.

For rally raids like the Dakar, however, teams are forced to rely on step-by-step roadbooks, which provide minimal insight aside from a few notes on the terrain and the general distance and direction to the next waypoint of the route. Heger had zero experience in this department, but luckily, the Polaris Factory team had an ace in the hole.

“When you race a rally on a motorbike, you’re all alone. You’re doing the navigation yourself, the mechanical work by yourself, and you’re taking on all of the risk.” said Jean Philippe Nicolao, project manager for Polaris’ partner team Sebastien Loeb Racing. “There’s no better way to learn rally navigation or how to manage your vehicle for a marathon race like this.”

In this sense, Max Eddy may be the most qualified navigator in desert racing today. Before finding success in the four-wheeled world, Eddy enjoyed one of the most decorated careers in motorcycle racing with five wins apiece at both the Baja 1000 and Baja 500 events.

The team’s decision to bring Eddy on board for this year’s Dakar was a no-brainer. Once that was settled, the real work started.

Neither Brock nor Max were able to quote a ballpark figure of just how much time they spent strapped in the seat, honing their navigation skills, but the investment was immense. Here’s the training schedule I was able to piece together after hours of interviews between the two pilots and their respective team managers.

• One full week in Lake Havasu, Arizona, dialing in engine calibration.
• One full week out in the Glamis Dunes tuning the suspension for deep sand.
• One full week in Pahrump, Nevada, training navigation with off-road legend Jimmy Lewis.
• One full week in Sonora, Mexico, learning to use the Dakar-specific digital roadbook.

That’s at least four full weeks of training, all of which was going on in the middle of a full season of racing events like the San Felipe 250 and King of the Hammers. Eddy also has four previous Dakar runs as a navigator under his belt, including a run with “Ironwoman” Kristen Matlock back in 2021.

“Yeah…I’d say I’ve got enough experience to get us lost,” laughs Eddy. “This race only happens once a year though, so we really have to up our training game on the navigation front.”

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To ensure nothing was left up to chance, Polaris even went as far as to fly last year’s Dakar winner Xavier de Soultrait into Mexico to join Brock and Max for the week. A veteran of both the moto and UTV classes, de Soultrait shared his knowledge of navigating the Saudi desert while Heger and Eddy got him up to speed on the latest changes to the race car.

With hundreds of hours of training under their belts (in addition to a lifetime of practice), Brock and Max had everything they needed—all that was left was to devise a strategy, which historically plays a huge role in a multi-day rally like the Dakar.

It was the last question I got to ask Brock before the helmet went on and the race began: “So what’s your strategy going into this?”

For obvious reasons, the topic is usually pretty hush-hush around camp. I knew my story wouldn’t be out until after the race was over though, so it felt like a safe ask. Brock didn’t skip a beat.

“For us, we’re throwing the strategy out the window. We don’t plan on slowing down anywhere. We know what the car can do, we’ll let the results fall into place.”

The Dust Clears

Following a massive win like Brock and Max’s—capturing the SSV category victory at the 47th Dakar Rally by a two-hour margin—it’s easy to chalk results this dramatic up to equal parts luck, talent, and sheer force of will. As the old axiom goes, “Fortune favors the bold.”

Before the race began, Brock’s confidence struck me as cavalier, maybe even borderline irresponsible. You travel clear across the world to spearhead a multi-million dollar factory racing effort and your strategy for the next two weeks boils down to something like “Go fast, don’t die?”

At the end of the day, the Dakar comes down to two things: speed and consistency. You have to go fast to stay out front, but you have to keep your car together for two weeks if you actually want to see the finish. Brock and Max did both handily.

From the very beginning, a series of consistent podiums saw Brock and Max take the lead by the fourth stage. They held that lead for the remainder of the race, avoiding mechanical issues entirely and successfully navigating 5,000 miles of unforgiving desert without a single noteworthy hiccup. By the time they crossed the finish, Brock and Max had clocked a total of 59 hours, 13 minutes, and 11 seconds of nearly flawless racing.

“The amazing thing about Brock as a driver is how incredibly quick he is, but also how gentle he is out on the race track,” said Polaris Motorsports director Alex Scheuerell. “I remember at the end of the Baja 1000 we looked at his brake pads and they looked brand new. Every other vehicle’s were absolutely toasted. He’s so smooth, he’s got that flow.”

Did raw talent see Brock and Max across the finish line this year? How much of it should we attribute to sheer luck, grit, or even hubris? Fortune may favor the bold, but I suspect there’s another axiom at play that better explains the team’s dominance this year: “Hard work pays off.” 

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