With only five stages remaining, the chase for the Dakar title has become no less exciting. As Volkswagen teammates Carlos Sainz and Lucas Cruz suffered yet another puncture on yesterday’s ninth stage, Nasser Al-Attiyah and Timo Gottschalk guided their Race Touareg to a third stage win and the largest win margin of this year’s event.
Qatari Al-Attiyah and German co-driver Gottschalk not only got to La Serena six minutes ahead of the Spanish duo of Sainz and Lucas but, more importantly, also significantly closed the gap between themselves and the current race leaders, despite yesterday’s special being shortened to 170 km. VW teammates Giniel de Villiers and Dirk von Zitzewitz, took third, but are only 7th overall – more than 4hours 30minutes behind Sainz/Cruz.
“That was my stage. Before the start we decided to attack. Loads of sand, several dune fields, some with camel grass. I was able to make up a lot of time here. Now I trail my teammate Carlos Sainz by a good eight minutes after clawing back six. Because the forthcoming stages should also suit me I hope to be able to be in with a shout of taking overall victory,” Al-Attiyah said.
Dakar legend Stephane Peterhansel and French compatriot Jean-Paul Cottret, chasing down the lead Volkswagen in their BMW X3 CC, got stuck after almost 100 km. Unfortunately, the Frenchmen lost 18 minutes in the process of freeing the car.
“I made a mistake and we were stuck in a slow place, I fell into a hole in the camel grass. It took a time to move the car very slowly. It was a day when it was easy to make mistakes. The difference to the top three is large and we are now relying on others to have problems,” Peterhansel admitted.
Having been on somewhat of a comeback over the last few stages, the gap between Peterhansel (fourth overall) and the leading trio of Volkswagens, headed up by Sainz, Al-Attiyah and yesterday’s fifth place finishers Mark Miller and Ralph Pitchford, is seemingly impossible to close unless the cars up front encounter tremendous bad luck over the next five days.
With Miller/Pitchford’s Touareg about 27 minutes behind Sainz, the leading VWs are all within a half hour of each other, while Peterhansel/Cottret are 2hours 15 minutes behind. Behind Peterhansel and Cottret, their X-Raid teammates Guerlain Chicherit and Tina Thoerner, who finished fourth yesterday, are breathing right up into their exhausts with only a 15-minute gap between the two remaining X3 CCs.
“Not a simple stage, as you could lose time very easily. After around 40 or 50 km we had a puncture, which we changed quickly. Afterwards we overtook Peterhansel in the X-raid BMW who had got bogged down. From then on I was the lead car in the stage together with my co-driver Lucas Cruz – this certainly wasn’t an advantage,” Sainz reflected afterward.
Today’s 10th stage includes 238 km of timed special, in which the competitors leave the Atacama Desert on a technical route set out on the way to Santiago, before they back over the Andes into Argentina tomorrow. The competitors have been warned of the dense vegetation and in particular, the many cacti dotted along the route…
