The day “has been a film to not sleep” for Carlos Sainz. The man from Madrid started with a very good rhythm in the fight against the clock. He caught Van Loon, caught up with Nasser and got past him after a puncture. But there the luck ran out. When he led the Qatari by almost nine minutes, the problems began “suddenly in a right-hand corner”, where he noticed “something strange in the rear suspension”. The sensations did not fail, the kneecap was broken and to top it off, the job was complicated: “Neither Lucas nor I are happy, because it could be done faster. We have had a problem that makes us very angry, but we are not mechanical and under stress…”, it is clear that everything is complicated. The man from Audi knows where the error has been, although it is more difficult for him to understand why the fault occurred: “It had never broken, perhaps yesterday’s stones made a fissure, They are strong kneecaps that have never caused problems”.
Apparently they are not too concerned about reliability, they will maintain their confidence in the car and only change strategy after having suffered a second setback. What will it be? That of going on the attack and trying to recover the time that they have also given up with a simple puncture that has ended up becoming an odyssey: “We had a problem with the jack, our mistake too. It didn’t go up and we had to climb the car on some rocks to change the wheel. When doing that we have punctured the other one and in the repair one of the screws was reversed. We couldn’t remove it, our wheel wrench also broke and we had to wait for Ekstrom to be able to change it”. It has been a cycle of misfortunes that, however, continue to leave him options in the fight for the race. “Half an hour on a Dakar is quite a bit,” Sainz acknowledges, but this one is being so special that there is always hope.
“We’re seeing a Dakar where many things happen And if that is the tonic, let’s hope that more things don’t happen to us and it happens to those in the head. But now that we are going to have to change our strategy and go on the attack, you also buy tickets for more things to happen to you. But we are going to try and it will not be left for us”, says Carlos, about what he expects after some problems that, being the third day, are welcome: “If you are going to have a big problem like today, it is Better that it happens to you at the beginning because of course you have more days to recover ”.
will have exactly 11 days of racing with terrain that will change. Despite all the emphasis on the potential of this Audi in the dunes, Carlos does not believe “there will be many differences” and for now, he prefers to focus on the next day where it is not yet known what will happen. The rains have left images “that They gave me a little goosebumps.” The man from Madrid acknowledges, although he is confident that the goodness of the terrain will leave the length of the stage intact: “Here the water runs fast. There is a lot of sand and it usually drains well.” And hopefully so. Because the more kilometers, the more options there will be to overcome.