The proverbial fat lady began her vocal warm up during stage 11 of the Dakar Rally, as Nasser Al-Attiyah sailed ahead, leaving team-mate and archrival Carlos Sainz floundering in the dust after the Spaniard and former WRC champion broke his suspension trying to chase the Qatari down.
With the stage shortened from the intended 622 km to 530 km because of torrential rain, Sainz had been slightly ahead of Al-Attiyah on the stage before El Matador’s Touareg ended in a ditch with the left front wheel ripped off… Luckily team-mates Mark Miller and Ralph Pitchford (who’ve been carrying spares for the team for most of this year’s event) were not too far from the scene, but Sainz was still stationary for an hour.
Despite being far down in fourth in the overall standings, Stephane Peterhansel pushed his BMW X3 within reaching distance of Al-Attiyah on the special stage, crossing the finish just 1 minute and 13 seconds behind lead Touareg. South African Giniel de Villiers wasn’t very far off the pace, just 4 minutes behind his team-mate, and was second overall, more than 30 minutes ahead of Sainz, who is in turn 20 minutes ahead of Peterhansel.
“Today we had a good start. Everything was okay, the car worked very well and there were no problems. There was a lot of dust on the stage, but the good thing is that we finished and we'll see what we can do tomorrow. I'm quite happy and I will do my best to reach Buenos Aires. Tomorrow will be a different day and we will open the stage, but I don't think there will be any problems for us and we'll take it really easy,” Al-Attiyah admitted.
“The second part of the stage was much harder than we had previously expected. The first part was also tricky. Many canyons and bushes meant plenty of work at the steering wheel. We benefited from Carlos’ problem – it was a tough break for him after he’d driven so well for so long. It shows that anything can happen every day during this extremely tough rally. You have to be alert all the way to the finish. This is how my co-driver Dirk von Zitzewitz and I have been since the start and we plan to keep it that way to the finish,” said De Villiers.
Today the penultimate stage of this year’s Dakar pits the competitors against more canyons, sharp rocks and river beds – 555 km of it between San Juan and Cordoba.