Faced with the story of a stage marked by suffering, having paid less than half an hour in the general classification to Nasser Al-Attiyah appears a sporting miracle. Sebastien Loeb on Monday he arrived at the bivouac welcomed by the applause of the Prodrive BRX team as he had won the second stage at the helm of the Hunter, reaching nine minutes from the Qatari of Toyota, yesterday the faces were decidedly darker in the BRX home, but the nine-time champion in the rally was heroic together with co-driver Fabian Lurquin.
“After 10 kilometers I felt a crash following a landing and it is never a good sign – said Loeb as reported by today’s edition of the French newspaper L’Equipe – shortly after we drilled and therefore we were able to carry out a first analysis of what had happened. The longitudinal axis was broken and therefore I no longer had four-wheel drive, but only two for the remaining 250 km. We had to face the dunes in 40 km / h, which is a torment because there is not enough power and the risk of being trapped is very high. At km 60 we could count on a 20 minute break to choose what to do without assistance and we decided to deflate the tires to have the maximum traction available. On the crest of a dune, however, the engine stalled and we were downhill without power. We stopped right away and used the ropes to pull the Hunter up before it sank. Losing 33 minutes in the light of all this is still an acceptable budget “. Incredulous David Richards, head of the Prodrive BRX team: “We don’t really understand what happened. The longitudinal axis is completely broken, but we have never had this problem during the thousands of kilometers of testing “.
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