Better now than a week from now, but the third stage of the Dakar cannot be considered, far from it, a success for the great Spanish favorites. Both Carlos Sainz in cars and Joan Barreda in motorcycles suffered with navigation, on a day disputed in the middle of the desert in the Wadi Al-Dawasir loop. Cristina Gutiérrez also had a hard time on the light prototypes. For Sainz it was, in his own words, “a tough day.” And that started well. Until the checkpoint of kilometer 137 everything was going smoothly: by not opening the track, he benefited in the fast zone and pointed out that it was going to be a day to, at least, fight the result against Stéphane Peterhansel and Nasser Al-Attiyah . It was in 183, the fourth checkpoint, when the debacle was consummated: Sainz had left half an hour.
To find the reason, you had to look at the map. In between, the Spanish’s Mini had gotten lost. The difficulty of this day in the ’empty quarter’, in an extension of desert dunes that suppose a hell for the sailors, and more when (David Castera already warned him) wind was expected that could change the landscape and configuration of the ground. If to that is added the decision to give the roadbook with only 20 minutes of margin, it was quite predictable that there would be sailors, even the most seasoned, who would be wrong. In this case, it was Lucas Cruz’s turn.
Between WP3 and WP4, Sainz and Cruz missed a checkpoint of passage. They skipped one, and realizing that they had not validated the one that corresponded, they turned around. The ‘Matador’ began to follow rivals’ lines until he found the right point, while his co-pilot tried to help him with the impotence that comes from knowing that he was lost. From the Dakar website, a new utility showed it in a very graphic way. Sainz (among other competitors) began to go around in a circle until he crossed that intermediate checkpoint that they lacked in order to advance to the next ones. In the trance, they allowed themselves half an hour. And since all skinny dogs are fleas, they also punctured a wheel and had to stop for a few more moments.
At the end of a day that could have turned out well, Sainz and Cruz had left 31 minutes and two seconds with the winner of the day, a Nasser Al-Attiyah that, for the moment, does not fail. Neither he nor Stéphane Peterhansel, who also punctured at the start of the special, but which finished just four minutes behind the Qatari, with the South African Henk Lategan in between them two minutes behind his leader at Toyota, benefiting from his good work in the navigation and piloting.
“It has not been a good day. At one point Lucas has gone through a ‘waypoint’, but he thought we were in another and that has been a serious problem for us. Losing half an hour is really a lot. It’s a shame, but it’s the way it is. You have to keep going, lower your head and push “, Sainz explained when he arrived at the bivouac, so that later his navigator, who has led him to victory so many times, would also give his explanations. «We have deviated from the course and with such bad luck that we have validated the next point to validate. In the end I have realized it and we have returned to look for the point. And to top it all, we punctured », lamented one of the co-drivers who failed the least on the Dakar. “We lose together and we win together,” Sainz later clarified on Twitter.
After this day, the always little attacking Peterhansel remains in front of the general, with 5:09 over Al-Attiyah, while Sainz falls to fourth place with 33:04 disadvantage. There are days ahead.
Barreda sinks on the day of ‘Gasolinagate’
The stage started with controversy on the motorcycle side. On the night of the previous stage, Yamaha made a complaint to the organization when they found more than two liters of water in Andrew Short’s gas tank, which he was forced to abandon due to a breakdown derived from it. The ASO studied what happened and discovered that they had a serious and somewhat surreal problem: one of the tanks used for the organization’s ‘refueling’ had water. The public complaint came from David Palmada, mechanic of the FN Speed Team with the Valencian Tosha Schairena, and from there everything began to move.
A surreal picture was experienced in the bivouac: dozens of motorcycles in a caravan waiting for the tanks to be refilled, while many others were dismantled so that they could be emptied of that mixture of water and gasoline.
Toby Price, who saw how this problem left him without the rear tank of his KTM, won this Tuesday in a stage that he described as “a roller coaster”. Not so much because of the constant ups and downs through the dunes, but also because he knows that he will have to open the track this Wednesday and, therefore, he will suffer. The best mirror is in Joan Barreda, who gave 24 minutes on a bad day without palliative, in which he paid for having won the previous day.
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