As we near the end of the 2017 Dakar, the pressure is on. Sébastian Loeb and Stéphane Peterhansel are battling it out. The day’s route brought racers from Chilecito, Argentina to San Juan, Argentina over a 751 kilometer (466 miles) course. The weather has heated back up and is another exhaustion factor for racers to deal with.
Early in the race, around 83 kilometers (51.5 miles), Peterhansel had an unfortunate run-in with a motorcycle rider. “Today was a really complicated with a lot of navigation in the river beds,” Peterhansel said. “Everybody was completely lost. The biker was in turning back and just when he saw me he put the brakes on and crashed and I stopped on him. I saw that his leg was broken but he was still conscious. We stayed for about fifteen or twenty minutes with him to wait for the medical helicopter. Afterward, it was really complicated to restart, to drive at a good speed. It wasn’t an easy day. We need to do the calculation to know exactly what the time is, probably first, but the main thing wasn’t the race today, it was the crash with the biker”.
Peterhansel’s concern for the rider resulted in losing a fair amount of time to Cyril Despres and Loeb. Despres took the lead for a while but ultimately had to slow his pace down. “We did well on the first part of the day,” Despres explains. “We gained six minutes on Sébastien Loeb, but afterward I think he was fighting for the lead and he demonstrated the speed he had. It was really impressive. We slowed the pace down a little bit. We didn’t have any air coming in inside the car and it was quite hot, around 50°C inside the cockpit, so I decided to slow down a little bit.”
The tides changed for Peterhansel though. He blasted back up through the pack and overtook Loeb. By the end of the stage, there was a nearly six-minute gap between the two. The final podium result was Peterhansel, Loeb, and Despres in first, second and third respectively. The general standings are the same.
We’ve only had two more stages until the end. The Peugeot drivers taking up first through third currently only have a ten-minute gap between them all, this is still anyone’s race.
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