The scant 114 kilometers timed at the entrance to the ‘Empty Quarter’ led to the change of motor leader in favor of Kevin Benavides and a comfortable win for Loeb in cars
The toughest rally in the world has needed a day of unexpected relaxation after what happened on stage 9. The entrance to the ’empty chamber’, the Rub al Khali desert (the largest sand-only desert in the world), has not been much less risky for the competitors, who only had to run 114 timed kilometers in career mode and then had to make more than 500 purely driving contacts.
On arrival at the vast expanse of 65,000 kilometers of dunes, the appearance of rain in the preceding days meant that the terrain was not as volatile as expected. This helped make the bikes, quite unexpectedly, faster than the cars at the first checkpoints until the middle of the day special. On two wheels, which is still the category where it is least possible to predict who will win, the big beneficiary was Kevin Benavides, who is the new general classification leader after being exactly one minute behind the winner of the day, Ross Branch. The Argentinian KTM rider cannot be trusted as he was only able to overtake the leader, Skyler Howes, by barely a second, meaning a technical tie for the final four days of the raid in practice.
Without Barreda, who left the Dakar on Tuesday with a fracture in the L2 lumbar vertebra, Lorenzo Santolino is the first Spanish option on two wheels. The Salamanca man has dropped one place after his heroic performance on stage 9, in which he sacrificed his performance to help Chile’s Nacho Cornejo who had an accident, but his candidacy for the ‘top 10’ remains very much alive. He is only 2 minutes away from putting himself in that zone of honor.
One more day, Sebastien Loeb has a stage victory that did not live up to his ambitions. The nine-time World Rally Champion had no problem taking his fourth partial victory in this edition of the raid, third in a row, after easily beating the only Audi left in the competition, that of Matthias Ekstrom, who in theory was the one he had beaten. would have fewer choices within the ‘Dream Team’ of the brand with the four rings. With just 3 and a half minutes to spare, Loeb once again showed that the Hunter BRX is a very versatile prototype in these kinds of conditions.
The one who neither suffers nor wants is Nasser Al-Attiyah. The Qatari prince has hardly applied any pressure since the problems were confirmed days ago that ultimately weighed down not only Loeb in the general classification, but also Sainz who is already on his way to Madrid to rest after a Dakar that did not go as expected. Al-Attiyah is inevitably heading for his fifth ‘Touareg’, and other than maximum surprise, he needn’t look for partial victory to keep him afloat. In this 70-mile entrance to the “empty room” of Arabia, he allowed himself the luxury of giving up more than five minutes with Loeb.
As relaxed as the first sip of the closed Saudi desert has been, a Thursday like that can turn into a bitter pill. The first part of the marathon stage is full access to the giant Rub al Khali dunes (some can be over 300 meters steep), where 274 grueling kilometers of special are run. The potential navigational difficulties on the giant sand sea will be added to the added difficulty that there will be no mechanical assistance at the Ardah camp, which after more than 4,000 disputed kilometers could mean the end of many participations in this raid.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
