Before turning to motorsport, Loeb was an accomplished gymnast — a four-time Champion of Alsace and once champion of the French Grand Est region, reaching fifth place in the French national championship. He broke off school in 1992 but resumed studies in 1994 with a focus on electrical engineering, and on 12 September 1994 began working as an electrician near Haguenau Airport. In 1995, at age 21, he left that career path entirely for racing.
He began entering events in the French Citroën Saxo Trophy series in 1998 and won the title in 1999. With Guy Fréquelin as mentor and team principal of Citroën Sport, Loeb entered the Junior World Rally Championship in 2001 and became its first-ever champion, winning five of the six rounds. That same year, in only his third outing in a World Rally Car, he drove a Citroën Xsara WRC in the WRC proper at Rallye Sanremo and finished second behind eventual winner Gilles Panizzi.
Loeb's first season as a WRC driver came in 2002 with the Citroën Total World Rally Team, which participated in only seven rounds as a build-up to a full campaign. He provisionally won the Monte Carlo Rally but lost the result after a two-minute penalty for an illegal tyre change. He took his maiden WRC victory at the Rallye Deutschland that year, edging out Richard Burns.
In 2003, his first full WRC season, Loeb won three events — Monte Carlo, Germany, and Sanremo — before narrowly losing the drivers' title to Petter Solberg by a single point at the Wales Rally GB. His team-mates included former champions Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae, both of whom he outperformed over the course of the year.
In 2004 Loeb secured his first drivers' championship, winning six rallies and finishing 36 points ahead of Solberg. He proved himself on all surfaces that year, winning the snow-based Swedish Rally — becoming the first non-Nordic driver to win that event — and taking victories on gravel and tarmac alike. In 2005 he extended his tarmac dominance by winning ten events in a single season, a record for a WRC campaign, and became the first driver to win six consecutive WRC rallies. At the 2005 Tour de Corse he won every single stage — another WRC first. He won the title that year by a 56-point margin, breaking a 25-year-old record.
When PSA pulled both Peugeot and Citroën out of the WRC at the end of 2005, Loeb raced with the privateer Kronos Total Citroën team in 2006 while the new Citroën C4 WRC was developed. Despite missing the last four events of the season due to a broken humerus sustained in a mountain-biking accident, his accumulated points lead was so large that he won the 2006 championship by a single point when Marcus Grönholm failed to finish adequately in Australia.
From 2007 onward, driving the Citroën C4 WRC and later the DS3 WRC, Loeb extended his title streak through 2012, capturing nine consecutive world championships. His rivalry with Sébastien Ogier within the Citroën team defined the 2011 season, described in the press as "war between the two Sebs." Loeb clinched his ninth title at his home event, the Rallye de France, in 2012. He announced his retirement from full-time WRC participation at the same event. By that point he had accumulated 80 WRC victories and held records for most event wins, most podiums, and most stage wins in the history of the series.
After his full-time retirement, Loeb entered selected WRC events. In 2018 he won the Rally Catalunya driving for Citroën — his last WRC win in that campaign. In 2022, joining M-Sport Ford part-time alongside new co-driver Isabelle Galmiche, he won the Monte Carlo Rally, his 80th WRC victory, becoming the oldest driver to lead and win a WRC event. Galmiche became the first woman co-driver to win a WRC event since Fabrizia Pons in 1997.
As his WRC reputation grew, Loeb branched into road racing. He competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the first time in 2005 with the Pescarolo Sport team. In 2006 he finished second overall in the race driving a Pescarolo-Judd, splitting the two diesel-powered Audi R10 entries that dominated the top positions.
In 2013 he participated in the FIA GT Series for his own team, Sébastien Loeb Racing, which had been founded in 2012. The team entered two McLaren MP4-12C cars, and Loeb took four wins across the season on his way to fourth overall. He also competed in the World Touring Car Championship from 2014 to 2015 driving for the Citroën factory team, winning two races in 2014 and four in 2015, finishing third in the championship in both seasons.
Loeb made his Dakar Rally debut in 2016 driving a Peugeot 2008 DKR. He took a best Dakar finish of second place in 2017 and again in 2022 and 2023. From 2021 onward he competed in the World Rally-Raid Championship (W2RC) for the Bahrain Raid Xtreme team, driving the BRX Hunter. In 2022 he won the Andalucia Rally, his first rally-raid victory, making him the only driver in history to win an event in four different FIA-affiliated world championships.
From 2016 to 2018 Loeb competed in the FIA World Rallycross Championship with Team Peugeot-Hansen, scoring wins in Latvia in 2016 and Belgium in 2018. In 2021 and 2022 he partnered with Cristina Gutiérrez in the Extreme E Championship for Lewis Hamilton's Team X44, winning the 2022 Extreme E title by two points over Rosberg X Racing.
In 2013 Loeb set a new outright record at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, driving a Peugeot 208 T16 — an 875 kg, 875 bhp, 3.2-litre twin-turbo V6 machine — with a time of 8:13.878, improving the previous record by more than a minute and a half. That record was subsequently broken by Romain Dumas in 2018.
Loeb is a five-time winner of the Race of Champions individual title, claiming the Henri Toivonen Memorial Trophy in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2022, and 2025, and won the Nations Cup for France twice.
Loeb grew up in Oberhoffen-sur-Moder and lives near Lausanne, Switzerland. He was made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on 27 May 2009. He was named French Sportsman of the Year in 2007 and 2009, and is a member of the "Champions for Peace" organisation. He founded his own motorsport team, Sébastien Loeb Racing, in 2012.