After winning the first four special stages, Volkswagen had to take a back seat to the BMW X3 of former champion Stephane Peterhansel on stage five of the 2011 Dakar Rally between Calama and Iquique in Chile on Thursday. But in another strong showing on an event they have dominated so far, the four works Volkswagen Race Touaregs finished 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th with Carlos Sainz retaining his overall lead of the race.
In a cat and mouse contest where the stage lead changed hands several times and the outcome remained open to the finish, the Frenchman gave his team its first stage win since the penultimate stage on last year’s event, completing the 423-km route in the Atacama Desert 1 min 24 sec ahead of Nasser Al-Attiyah and 3 min 15 sec in front of race leader Carlos Sainz. South African Giniel de Villiers was fourth, 5 min 21 sec behind Peterhansel, and American Mark Miller and South African co-driver Ralph Pitchford were fifth, 20 min 42 sec in arrears.
As expected, the rally is hotting up as it enters its off the road sand dune phase and there are now less than three minutes separating the top three contenders after 1 676 km and nearly 16 hours of racing. Sainz’s overall lead is 2 min 26 sec over Peterhansel with Al-Attiyah just seven seconds behind the Frenchman.
De Villiers, winner of the Dakar in 2009, is fourth overall after a consistent run so far, 21 minutes behind the leader but well-positioned to take advantage of any mishap that might happen in front of him. Miller and Pitchford improved two places to occupy seventh overall, 1 hr 26 min 03 sec behind after they rolled their car on stage two on Monday.
At the end of the stage the drivers thrilled the fans with a spectacular 2 300-metre descent down a 700-metre high sand dune – the famous Cerra Dragon – directly into the bivouac. On the near-32-degree slope the cars reached a top speed of up to 220 km/h.
De Villiers commented that the day’s stage was extremely rough in the beginning, with washed out riverbeds that put the Race Touareg to the test. “That’s when we suffered a puncture and didn’t change the tyre as quickly as we could have. Our rivals took many risks today. We didn’t want to do that at the end of the stage, which had a lot of hilltop jumps, and so we lost another minute. The downhill race to the finish - flat out towards the Pacific Ocean – was pure adrenalin.”
Ralph Pitchford: “It was rough and tough. We got caught on the wrong side of a canyon and lost time getting back. We ended up spending more time in the dunes than we should have, otherwise it was a good stage.”
Friday’s stage six from Iquique to the northern coastal town of Arica in Chile is the last before a rest day at Arica. Competitors will follow a short 38-km liaison stage before attempting a challenging 456-km special stage through giant sand dunes and ‘fesh fesh’, the notorious fine powdery dust called the ‘talcum of the desert’. The long day closes with a 228-km liaison to the overnight bivouac.
STORY BY VOLKSWAGEN
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