The game is about to start and Cupra goes out to play it with everything. The Spanish brand has completely revolutionized its image for a second season of Extreme E, in which they up the ante with news that places them among the favorites of a course that will be inaugurated in the desert for the second consecutive year. The setting does not change to welcome 2022, but the protagonists who will go out for all in Neom on February 19 do. And it is that at the wheel of the Tavascan, the new design with which the Spanish firm will compete, materialized in the image and likeness of its future electric SUV, four-time Dakar winner Al Attiyah will wear.
The Qatari joins the electric competition with Cupra and will take over from Ekstrom inside a car, maintains the female Jutta Kleinschmidt. The only woman to win the Dakar to date (she won in 2001), she “has all the experience of last year to arrive very prepared” and will accompany Nasser on a new adventure where her goal remains the same as the one that led her to lift the 2022 Touareg: “Be strong to be the winners. It is a very good opportunity as a driver to give the maximum and win, because here the top riders compete and we know it will be a very close battle between all of us”.
Al Attiyah has been the great revelation in the debut of a firm like Cupra, which faces its second chance in the competition with the ambition of being at the top, after a discreet debut in which they closed the year with the fifth position of the general, in spite of undergoing a change of pilot in the middle of the course. But the brand’s new bet makes it clear what his intentions are: “Hopefully we can fight for the championship.” Xavi Serra, technical director of Cupra Racing, revealed all the novelties of a model that “they have injected the DNA of the brand”, to expose a super look that renews the image of the competition car with which they will try “fight for podiums from Arabia in 2 weeks”.
During the previous course they reached that goal in Sardinia, but the first scenario of the year is very favorable for a pilot like Al Attiyah who toured his arena just a month ago in the Dakar. “The race will be in Arabia, so I will arrive full of confidence to try to win,” says the Qatari, “very proud to share this experience with her (Kleinschmidt) because it is one of the best drivers in the world and we make a good team”. After having followed “very closely” what Extreme E is, he ventures into a competition where Sainz assured that his first confirmed would have been Nasser. That pilot in whom sportsmanship reigns, because he sees it as an obligation “to respect all the pilots and teams, because everyone wants to win”, although acknowledges that they have “a good opportunity”. Competition is the heart of the Cupra brand and it is about to start beating.