Mena holds 13th spot at Atacama Rally

COPIAPO, CHILE: Sandwiched between the Andes mountain ranges and the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama desert is known to offer a scenic landscape as one traverses its 1000 kilometres of land mass.

One of the driest deserts in the world, it offers clear skies for majority of the year. On Wednesday, however, foggy conditions meant that the second stage of the Atacama Rally, which was also the longest, had to be cut short to 303 kilometres from the originally scheduled 440 kilometres.

For riders, there was no time to enjoy the scenic background as they had the harsh terrain to conquer.

Hero MotoSports riders stuck to their task to close gap on the rivals ahead. Oriol Mena main- tained his 13th place in the overall standings after finishing 10th in stage two while Joaquim Rodrigues moved to 14th.

“The trial sections in the first half of the stage had a lot of rocks and it wasn’t too good for my back and the second part was even faster. I still don’t have that much speed in me to go full gas all the time, so decided to take it easy and get myself back to the bivouac,” said the Portuguese Rodrigues.

“It was a really fast and good stage for me. The piste zone and enduro style trial sections right up to the refuel point were very fast and technical,” teammate Mena of Spain remarked.

Meanwhile, Honda’s Kevin Benavides won the second stage to sit atop the time charts. He is one-minute, 53 seconds ahead of local lad Pablo Quintanilla of the Husqvarna Rally Team in the overall standings.