- 17 Ιαν 2024, 21:11
#852889
“Sorry, I don’t want to jump back into this car,” said an indignant Al-Attiyah. And he stuck to his word.
Loeb did his best to be pragmatic about his only potential helping hand against the Audi trio not sticking around to assist.
“He’s doing what he wants,” was Loeb’s riposte. “For sure in this situation, he was not so motivated to continue, he had some troubles. At one point he decided to leave. That’s his decision. It’s like that.
“He’s doing his own rally; he’s not doing the Dakar to help me. That’s how it is.
“For sure if I had another car starting behind me tomorrow it would be better.”
The other problem is the Hunter. Punctures are a given on the Dakar but both Loeb and Al-Attiyah, before he abandoned the race, had especially struggled with them. And it’s partly down to the design of the car itself.
“It’s our weak point; we have easily some punctures with the heat of the exhaust that are heating the rear tires,” explained Loeb.
Loeb is out of strategic options; this is no longer a chess match. He has to catch over 13 minutes in two stages. All he can do is push on.
Dakar’s penultimate test is a rough, rock-strewn affair, though. The puncture risk is high as it is. Knowing he’s potentially more liable to tire trouble than Sainz but with the need to push on, Loeb will have to strike the finest of balances on Thursday.
His road position is also a double-edged sword: good because he has some lines to follow, bad because of the increased puncture risk of running in the dust.
“I hope the dust will not be too big a problem also because we saw today a lot of guys complaining about the dust,” Loeb added.
“For me, when I changed the second wheel, I had two cars passing, I was in the dust, it was impossible to catch, so I decided to lift and stay behind because I couldn’t see anything and it was too risky to get another puncture in this situation.
“So hopefully tomorrow we will be able to overtake.”
He’ll need to make some passes. Starting 17th on the road, Loeb has Peterhansel directly in front of him and Sainz two cars behind.
https://dirtfish.com/off-road/dakar/...-to-win-dakar/
'It has the interior ambience of a tupperware container and the exterior design flair of an Adidas tracksuit. However this is all hiding a godly powertrain - no other car can extract grip from a surface quite like an Evo.'