Dakar | Sainz punctures 3 times but flies: “This is just the beginning”

The first stage of the 2024 Dakar Rally was full of problems for the drivers in the car category, with several punctures among the favourites. Carlos Sainz was one of those who suffered the most, with up to three punctures putting him back a lot in his goal of climbing positions to have a clear path.

This made the Spaniard quite happy with the result, a second place behind the surprise of the day, a Guillaume de Mevius who took the victory: “I'm very happy, in the end it was a positive result, but I thought we would have lost a lot of time. We are only at the beginning.”

The Spaniard explained to the media present, including Motorsport.com, that the series of punctures surprised him, as he did not expect to have them at the start of the special, before reaching the rocky area: “At the beginning there was half minute by minute, I thought it was from one minute to the next, but instead there was just dust and more dust. We lost a lot of time, but then, little by little, it became a little clearer, I was recovering the cars and up until the three minute mark, where the rocks started, I had some slow punctures.”

“I was losing little, so I kept going, and then, at about 15 or 20 kilometers, the stones started and I got a puncture, so I switched from the pull so as not to waste any more time on two wheels,” said the three-time winner of the Dakar Rally. “I kept going and then [ho avuto] a puncture, I had no more tyres, I kept going forward and in the dust, I met a car, I had another puncture and I had to change it.”

“After that, I had to fill the tire that had a puncture with air slowly, and I thought I had lost about fifteen or twenty minutes,” continued the Audi leader on the first special stage of the toughest race in the world, while acknowledging his stress about how the stage had gone. “We made a good stage, but the truth is that we were very stressed because we were without spare tyres.”

After crossing the finish line and reaching the Al Henakiyah bivouac, it was time to recharge the batteries and go back on the attack on the second day with a strategy he had yet to think about when he heard the instructions at the daily bivouac briefing: ” For the moment I'm going to take a shower, then I'll think about tomorrow's stage. Let's see what they tell us in the briefing and then we'll think about what to do.”