The odyssey of Laia Sanz when she was the brightest

After dinner, we waited Laia Sanz. The driver’s car Corbera de Llobregat I’m not in the tent Team Astara. It’s dark inside Alula and keep fighting to reach the goal, miles away. The driver from Corbera de Llobregat made sure everyone saw his skill at the wheel in a stage that all the drivers, including the most veteran, experienced and high-level ones, identified as one of the most difficult they had ever done. Loeb noted that there were stones about the size of footballs. Carlos Sainz he answered MD in a low voice, without the energy to raise it from the enormous mental effort he had to make to not play more than once. Loeb also had a 3 hole Chicherit, and Peterhansel two more. It’s torture for everyone. In this context, Laia shines in her own light by placing eighth in a special point. And the day didn’t start well.

He got punctured at kilometer 20 and there was the fear of getting punctured again. He decided to be careful and that’s what made him enter the Top-10. He crossed the equator of the stage touching that tenth place. I’m working on a stage. What no one knows is that Laia has a problem driving her car. Gas is shaky and doesn’t respond well to his signals.

It was just the beginning of a long, very difficult day, but where Laia once again showed her enormous Dakarian spirit and strength with Maurizio Gerini who was not only her co-driver, but also her best companion.

Laia tells everything to MD in his caravan. We went when he arrived. There’s his car with the KH-7 logo, and on the right side, a mechanic is scooping sand and more sand from inside the car. He filled an entire box with sand to dump it on the main street. Tomorrow people will step on that little piece of desert without knowing that it is a sample of Catalan strength. I just arrived. It was only 11:00 in the evening and MD knocked on the door of his caravan. There he was together, eating a plate of macaroni and tomato and cheese. Another in his place wants to be alone or mostly with his ‘kopi’. He asked us to join him at the table. That was when he was hungry for so many hours without eating (he ate the bars they brought despite not wanting to), instead of looking at his plate, he looked at the ground to keep from crying. He knows that fate has been unfair to his talent and his merits.

“Everything that happened to us. We have to go to the eighth…”. There he almost fell. Knowing that he can do a stage, his best result in cars. There he explained everything that happened to him. “The car started having trouble from km 130. I don’t know the reason, but it cut off the fuel. We thought it was the ‘cut off’, we removed the gearbox sensor, but it kept giving problems. Fortunately, I’m not too critical either, because we can arrive without wasting a lot of time, maybe 15, 20 minutes or half an hour.”he pointed out.

“When you were in eighth, I think it was at kilometer 230 and the car had gone 100 kilometers it failed. What happened was we were lucky that it was in the slow sections and it failed there. I think it must be some cable because of the vibrations. Because when I ran and the sand increased, the terrain was slower and more broken, that’s where it fell. But fortunately they were slow sections and then when it was fast and there was sand, the car ran”, he added, emphasizing one of the fears he suffered during the race due to the gas problem: “We had a big scare, because you make a quick turn and suddenly it pulls”. And not only that, Laia remembers with Maurizio Gerini, who also sat next to her to eat at the table of the caravan, the moment they luckily avoided falling about 5 meters into a hidden area of ​​rocks. “I saw it when we were there”highlighted Gerini.

Broken wheel stud

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, a wheel stud broke and they lost a lot of time there. After a while, they lost the light at an intersection. And in the end, running at 60 km/h to go to the camp, in the sand, he punctured twice when passing some stones hidden under the sand. In one of those many problems, at night, they even had to make a bonfire to keep warm in the middle of the desert while they fixed the car.

He asked about Sainz and the other competitors

Laia sinks, but at the same time, she tries to cheer herself up by setting the goal of achieving good results on the stage to continue to show her rhythm as she did at the start of the Dakar.

Despite great frustration and disappointment, Laia did not lose the heart to ask about how Carlos Sainz’s stage went, rejoicing in the beautiful stage that the ‘Matador’ made. He didn’t know any results and started asking for favorites. He was not even able to check the profile of stage 3. The worst was feared, far away and found a lot of dust.

SThen he was happy to learn that the forecast was for rain. “Let it rain hard!, so we don’t have dust”, He said. The emotional Laia returned, thinking about the next step and not looking back. Although then the frustration returned. It would take some time, until he could put his helmet back on. He can make a stage. The best thing is that everyone saw what he achieved.