It shouldn’t be easy to keep your spirits up when you get into a car and one day after another you have a problem. Let’s go over the list of everything he’s had to go through Cristina Gutierrez with the new Red Bull OT3 on the Dakar and they will understand: it has run out of direction, the clutch has broken, the rear differential (twice), two spark plugs in the most difficult stage … In addition to a few punctures. Doing the math, in total the Burgos has only one stage one hundred percent clean, the ninth in which she was second.
In the tenth she repeated position after another “fan problem”, although it did not make her “lose too much” time and we spoke with her later at the Bisha bivouac, once she was able to regain her smile a little. “It is being a difficult Dakar, especially on a mental level because we know that we can be there and when certain things happened in the car we had to do a ‘reset’ and start the next day just as strong. The positive is that we are getting over it and it is a pretty good training at a mental level, “he analyzes.
Even in this situation, Cristina draws positive conclusions, although “it is complicated”: “I have to surround myself with people who help me because many times I arrive very melted and I have to try to get the positive out of each day, otherwise I would throw in the towel the next. You have to go with everything every day. I have six dakares with this one and the first ones were very hard, I had to fight to survive every day and this works for you, it makes you a little silent. It is a Dakar that has not turned out as we expected, but I am proud of how I have managed to get out of trouble “.
That is why he considers that he has had “a very complete year.” “Everything has happened to me, and everything positive, I recovered from a serious injury and continued at the same level,” he says. His title in the Cross Country World Cup in T3 and his great debut in Extreme E attest to that. And for the future he would like to continue like this in the main class: “I would love to. When you have problems you say: ‘What am I doing here?’ But I feel comfortable and competitive in this category, if there is an opportunity in T1 we will value it. “For now, justice would be done if he wins a stage of the Dakar:” I think we deserve it. “
So relive your worst day
You have to choose from, but of all the bad days Cristina has had in the Dakar, the eighth stage was the worst. “We broke two spark plugs out of three, we were left in one cylinder, and it was the hardest stage so far, the level 3 dune stage. It was horrible. We were third, we were thinking of going for second in the general classification and it was a bump, we couldn’t do anything and we had to reach the end with what we had and we had a very bad time, “he relives. I couldn’t go above 2,000 rpm in the dunes bigger or 80 km / h on fast tracks.
