A leadership that goes up in smoke
Yazeed Al-Rajhi after five stages he was in command of the 46th edition of the Dakar with a nine-minute advantage over Nasser Al-Attiyah, winner of the last two editions at the wheel of the Toyota left this year to compete with Hunter Prodrive, the structure that will manage the Dacias starting from 2025 with the Qatari and Loeb as the spearheads of the team.
Al-Rajhi was holding the Toyota flag very high, but today in the first part of the 48-hour double stage he got into an accident at km 51. The crew – who suffered no health consequences – had to withdraw and this meant incurring a 24-hour penalty which definitively compromised Al-Rajhi's ambitions in the general classification. Al-Rajhi and co-driver Gottshalk were unable to repair the Hilux and are returning to the start of today's special stage.
The Dakar thus loses the leader of the car category, which now sees Al-Attiyah and Carlos Sainz engaged in a close duel as the two were separated by just two minutes at the start of today's stage. Sebastien Loeb instead pays 40 minutes to his brand mate, with the other two Audis of Ekstrom and Peterhansel closer on a day that has already had a significant twist on the balance of the raid. At the moment, after the first km, the hybrid buggies from the Quattro Cerchi house are ahead of everyone in this order: Sainz, Peterhansel and Ekstrom.
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