Loeb ‘go slow’ pays dividends

Shubaytah – Sebastien Loeb’s decision to “go slow” in stage five earlier in the week paid off yesterday as the Frenchman won the marathon two-day stage six at the Dakar Rally.

Veteran Spaniard Carlos Sainz finished second, two minutes and one second behind and took the overall lead, while five-time winner Nasser Al-Attiyah saw his hopes of winning a sixth title disappear with a mechanical problem in the last 50 kilometres.

Adrien van Beveren made it a double French success with victory in the bike race.

Loeb (above), a nine-time world rally champion, deliberately lost time on Wednesday so that he would not have to open the road on the virgin dunes at the start of the an unprecedented two-day marathon around Shubaytah – a 780km loop in the kingdom’s vast Empty Quarter, with more than 600km of specials for motorcycles and nearly 550km for cars.

Loeb, who has yet to win a Dakar Rally, started yesterday’s second part of the stage in third place, 37min behind Sainz, but carved his way through the dunes to claim his second stage win of the rally, having also taken stage four.

“The strategy was the right one,” said the Prodrive competitor, who has moved up to third in the standings 29min and 31sec behind Sainz.

“It was a good day for us, a good stage with no problems. It was very long, so the first part of the stage yesterday [Thursday] was more than 400km. I tried to take it a bit easy for the car especially and not to be too hard on it.

“I knew that it would be very hard mechanically for it to go through so many kilometres in the dunes.

“Today [yesterday], there was 150km left so I tried to push harder on this one, to get a good time and that’s what we did. So, there have been no problems at all for us with this long stage.

The 61-year-old three-time Dakar winner Sainz showed the value of experience as he brought his Audi home safely in second place gaining over eight minutes on his team-mate Mattias Ekstrom of Sweden, who is second in the standings 20min 21sec behind the veteran.

In the bike category, Van Beveren (Honda) took his fourth Dakar stage win since his first appearance in 2016.

He finished 4min 13sec ahead of Australian Toby Price (KTM) and 5min 2sec in front of the American Ricky Brabec (Honda), who has taken the overall lead from Ross Branch (Hero). –