Action hots up as Dakar hits boiling point
NINE-TIME World Rally Championship winner Sébastien Loeb was back in the race on Tuesday after rolling his car on Monday. Loeb’s car was repaired overnight and he returned for more action. The Frenchman and codriver Daniel Elena got stuck in the sand several times and also had to make mechanical repairs on the stage. They came home 1h13m47s behind Peugeot teammate Sainz.
The news was better for the Peugeot driven by Cyril Despres: the five-time bike race winner clocked the day’s sixth-fastest time. Despres could have recorded an even better time, but he stopped to help teammate Stéphane Peterhansel.
Nasser Al-Attiyah is continuing the fightback by showing his mastery of the off-piste stages. The Qatari was quickest on the splits before encountering two punctures simultaneously – but he has still managed to consolidate his third place.
Toby Price continues to lead the bike section, stretching his advantage to more than 24 minutes. But a portion of his hard work came to nothing when the organisers cancelled the stage two thirds of the way into the stage due to extreme heat. The Australian completed the whole stage, before it was shortened, and won that convincingly as well.
In the quads, Marcos Patronelli maintains the lead by just over a minute, while there are also no movers in the truck category, with Gerard de Rooy still hanging on to an advantage over Kamaz’s Eduard Nikolaev.
All the motorbikes and quads now go straight to parc ferme as yesterday was the first half of the second marathon stage of this Dakar, which meant that none of the vehicles were allowed mechanical assistance from service crews.
Yesterday, they faced even bigger sand dunes, with the Fiambala dunes section that were set to provide the biggest challenge of the rally to date over 278km. External temperatureson Tuesday have peaked at 47 degrees centigrade – less than 10 degrees off the highest temperature ever recorded in the world, which was 56.7 de-