Dakar | Sainz worried: “Tomorrow we will suffer a lot”

Carlos Sainz's first day of action in the 2024 Dakar Rally did not go as the Spaniard hoped, because despite starting confident and willing to work from the start to be in the leading positions with an intelligent strategy, he lost more time and he was far behind.

Although the result of the Prologue is not useful in terms of ranking, it served to define the starting positions for the first 405 kilometer special stage towards Al Hanakiyah.

The Spaniard explained that he hoped to leave a margin to gain one day later, but everything backfired when they got lost on the difficult course: “The plan was to finish fifteenth, or something like that, and the truth is that It didn't go well because we got lost at one point. Then, we stopped before the finish line and made a calculation error.”

“We thought we lost less than we actually lost, and if you add the time we stopped to make sure we were in the top ten, it was too much,” the three-time Touareg Trophy winner told a group of media including Motorsport.com.

The fact of having to start from the middle of the group means that he will have to open a gap between the cars which, a priori, are a little slower, and when he was asked to do this, he replied: “Above all it means that, starting from minute to minute, we will have to be patient in the first kilometers and see what we can achieve, opening a gap, without the dust. We will suffer a lot.”

“The moment you get lost, you don't know how much time you lost, it's something we miscalculated and that's it,” he continued of the problem that weighed him down, although Carlos Sainz is confident about his chances for the rest of the Rally Dakar.

“There is still a lot of competition and tomorrow we have to be patient. If we lose eight or nine minutes, we lose eight or ten minutes, nothing happens, there will be time to recover, the confidence continues, everything is going well, let's see how it goes.”