“The Audi is doing well, there is potential”

With his second place, it is the fifth stage (sixth if we count the prologue) that Sainz finish in podium position. The Madrilenian faced the second week of competition as a clean slate, having left the shock absorption problems of the Audi behind and the results are coming. AS, and other Spanish media, spoke with him upon his arrival at the Bisha bivouac, just before celebrating another double of the four rings with Peterhansel.

—Second and again fighting for a stage, that is always important.

Yes, doing first and second is a good result for Audi. Today we have not had any punctures, everything has gone more or less well, removing in a place where Seb returned (Loeb) and Mattias (Ekstrom), The three of us have gone, there was a lot of dust and we were wrong. We will have lost about a minute. Otherwise fine, happy with the car, no problem. A more or less clean stage.

– For the first Audi race, that each driver has achieved a victory is very significant.

—It means that a good job has been done, that the car is good, that the potential exists and that we must continue working.

—How do you manage to stay motivated knowing that nothing can be done in the general classification?

—From the first day it was difficult, because it was such a jug of cold water… In the end, the important thing is to continue in the rally to learn and draw conclusions by driving kilometers with the car. You have to remember that it is only the first race of the car and each kilometer we do has its incredible value.

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– Would you have fought for the Dakar without the chaos of the first day?

“I don’t believe because of the shock absorber problems, because that slowed us down a lot.” Now it’s fixed, but the first week we had losses that would have cost us the race. If the rally had started the second week, without those problems, I think we would have been in the fight. It is true that Nasser (Al Attiyah) he’s doing a rally to finish it managing speed, we don’t really know Toyota’s potential.

—How does your day to day change by not being in the fight?

– Same, because our goal is always to try to win stages and this second week was to start from scratch. I don’t know how we would fare in qualifying this week, but even though it is not being so clean because of the punctures, we would be ahead. It would be interesting to do that exercise to see where we would be.

“Are you liking the second week?”

—Well… It is that it is thoroughly as seen in the times. Today, the second part was more about driving, but the first was really very fast.

—There has been a lot of talk about Stage 11, do you think there is going to be a mess?

—They say it’s a difficult stage, I want to go over it to see how it’s going.

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