Moraes’ maiden Dakar stage win, on the 438km special between Al Duwadimi and Al Salamiya, saw the Brazilian move to fourth overall, 9:17s off the pace.

Overdrive Racing’s Al Rajhi finished third on the day but it was enough to see him go 29 seconds clear of Team Audi Sport’s Sainz at the top of the overall classification, with Mattias Ekstrom third at 8:26s back in another of the Audi RS Q e-trons.

Nasser Al-Attiyah rounds out the overall top five at 10:17s off the pace but fellow Prodrive Hunter steerer Sebastien Loeb dropped around 20 minutes due to punctures and is now ninth in the rally.

With dirt track for most of the first 90km, the field was separated by little and there were as many different leaders at each of the first three waypoints, namely Guerlain Chicherit (Overdrive Toyota), Romain Dumas (Rebellion Toyota), and then Stage 1 winner Guillaume De Mevius (Overdrive Toyota).

Dumas had another spell on top before Moraes hit the front at the Kilometre 310 waypoint, then Al-Attiyah at Kilometre 352.

The five-time Dakar champ held sway again at the final waypoint before the finish line, only to then cop another puncture which forced him to nurse his ‘Nasser Racing’ entry home with just a bare rim on the left-rear corner.

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Moraes prevailed by just nine seconds with Ekstrom exactly another minute in arrears, while Al-Attiyah salvaged fourth at 1:33s from victory.

Sainz took sixth on stage, clawing back a couple of minutes after an early navigational error.

For another World Rally Champion, though, it was a far worse day.

Loeb started Stage 3 just 4:17s from the overall lead but is now 24:58s down as punctures continued to afflict the Hunter drivers.

“It was a complicated day with three punctures, so after the third one we had to repair,” he recounted.

“We lost a lot of time repairing the tyre and inflating it again. Then we had to stop every 20 kilometres because it was losing air, so we lost a lot of time with this.

“It’s a bit of bad luck, because the punctures were all on the tread of the tyre, so it wasn’t like we were pushing very hard in the stones.

“Sometimes you have punctures driving slowly, sometimes you go fast and you have no punctures.

“It’s difficult to understand really how we can manage that and everybody is struggling with that. That’s how it is.”

Next up is a relatively short, 299km special between Al Salamiya and Al-Hofuf.

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General classification: Cars Top 10