The fifth stage the Dakar, the road of Arequipa, has broken into a thousand pieces the category of cars, as a large number of pilots have succumbed to the hardness of the sand dunes of Tanaka. Without making noise, as if it was easy, Stéphane Peterhansel has gained the stage victory and of step has given a blow of authority in general. On the opposite side of the coin, Sébastien Loeb has been trapped in a hole and after losing three hours, its continuity in the race is subject to the pains coccyx which drags Daniel Elena from the impact.
Cars
The crowning glory of the rough section on peruvian Dakar has been a special in the dunes of Tanaka that few will forget. Perhaps only Stéphane Peterhansel can remember with pleasure after cleaving the 268-kilometer timed in 2:51:19 hours. With this record, and his first stage victory under the arm, the Peugeot driver has exceeded in 4:52 minutes to Bernhard Ten Brinke and in 12:47 minutes to Giniel de Villiers. However, the biggest benefit to ‘Mr. Dakar’ has come from the hand of more than 18 minutes which has been endorsed by Carlos Sainz and that will leave you in the classification with more than half an hour of advantage.
The soft sand by the heat and the morphology of the dunes became the first kilometres of the special in a real screen in the more than 20 cars were trapped, all of them in a radius of little more than a square kilometre. Among them, Sébastien Loeb and Carlos Sainz were two of the affected, although the Spanish driver managed to resolve the situation relatively quickly. Most problems had to escape the French, in the end I got out of his prison to fall into a worse one. In the wake of the Toyota of Nasser Al-Attiyah, the nine times champion of the WRC fell with their Peugeot 3008 DKR Maxi in a hole.
The severe pain of coccyx Daniel Elena left to Loeb and his co-pilot out of the race, despite the fact that both managed to take the link road to Arequipa, but not before confirming its definitive abandonment. Still in the race, Nasser Al-Attiyah managed to finish fifth with 24 minutes missing, while ‘Orly’ Terranova and Khalid Al-Qassimi managed to circumvent the problems to the extent possible, to finish ahead of some of the old ‘foxes’ of the Dakar, which today have been known to make use of his experience, as is the case of Patrick Sireyjol, the own Cyril Despres, or Jakub Przygonski.
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