The fourth stage of the Dakar 2012 has not been fortunate for Laia Sanz either. If on the third day she was penalized, as well as twenty more participants, with an additional 40 minutes for skipping two waypoints, in the stage of Yesterday the problem was caused by an unfortunate crash with technical consequences and a good scare because she herself thought she had broken her hand. Finally, Laia will be able to take the start of the fifth stage without any problems.
In this fall, Laia’s fuel tank broke and she began to lose everything, having to work with the rear tanks and making fuel transfers with her backpacker Marc Guash. Finally , Laia entered in 86th position, almost 2 hours from the head of the race. In the general classification he is in 66th position , more than 4 hours behind Després, provisional leader after this fourth stage.
This is how Laia Sanz narrated it when she arrived at the finish line: “I fell in a very silly place, but with the bad luck that it was in a place of stones. The bike hit the front tank, which broke and I was losing fuel. Then I continued with the tanks at the back, until I was stranded with 30km to go. I had to transfer petrol from Marc’s bike using the camelbak tube and we lost a lot of time. Then the cars started to pass us and we found a complicated panorama with a lot of dust and very little visibility. It was a very bad day, and I hurt my hand.”
Up until that moment, he was making an extraordinary comeback in a
“very hard and complicated” stage,
in his words.
“At the beginning we were going very well because in the area of a dry river a lot of people got lost, but Marc and I found the right course, so we were able to overtake a lot of places.”
4TH STAGE OF THE DAKAR ON MOTORCYCLES
At the end of this day, the differences increase in the general classification between the two leaders and their main rivals. Cyril Despres and Marc Coma are separated by 8’10 in the top two places. Behind him is Helder Rodrigues (Yamaha) who is in third place at 26’48. Francisco López, fourth, is 29’50 behind and David Casteu, fifth, is 30’37 behind.
CYRIL DESPRÉS: “The difficult thing is that, after the rain that has fallen on the region in recent days, the tracks are quite deteriorated and many stones had been exposed. In addition, with the heat, it requires a great physical effort to maintain a good race pace in these conditions… So I’m pretty happy with my day. When I opened the track, while Marc was coming from far behind, I knew I was going to lose time, but I concentrated a lot on the navigation so as not to make any mistakes and I slowed down a bit before each note. And since today we had close to 400 goals, if I only lost two minutes, it’s not much, to be honest…”
MARC COMA: “It was a very tough stage, especially at the start, with a fast start, followed by navigation and then with water, a lot of water in the rivers. I tried to keep a good pace from the start, but it was difficult. I was able to overtake some riders and cut time in front of Cyril. There is still the Fiambalá stage and many others. For the moment I am present. And I’m going to fight every day.”
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