The French Sebastien Loeb (Prodrive) took the ninth special of the Dakar, the third he won in this edition of the rally -second in a row- and recovered from his bad start in the attack, where he was already third, but 1h43:08 in behind the leader, Nasser Al-Attiyah, whom he found impossible to reach.
“At this rate, we will need six months to catch up with Nasser. All in all, it was a good day and I’m happy to finish the stage,” he said after the finish line.
The Alsatian had a penalty of 2:10 for showing up late to the scheduled start.
“This morning we had a big scare; for a while we thought we were going to go back to our old habits at the beginning of the rally. They penalized us for a few minutes, but it wasn’t serious either,” he explained.
He pointed out that he stopped “at the link before the start of the special and at the time of the resumption of the march there was no way to start the car”.
“We have no fuel pressure, we checked all the connections, we called the engineer and it seems that a connector moved behind the fuel pump, possibly at the same time as the FIA made its records. We checked everything, i -reset and continued the career,” he said.
Due to this failure, he arrived ten minutes late at the start of a stage that was “very fast” and in which he lost “seven or eight minutes” until he found the road because he followed some motorcycle tracks that were not correct .
Source: La Verdad
I’m Rose Herman and I work as an author for Today Times Live. My expertise lies in writing about sports, a passion of mine that has been with me since childhood. As part of my job, I provide comprehensive coverage on everything from football to tennis to golf.
