Today’s victory by Nasser Al Attiyah, the works Toyota Gazzo Racing, in the 4th qualifying of the Dakar Rally narrowed the gap to Sebastian Leb by just a little, as the Frenchman followed the driver from Qatar in 25 seconds to the end of the day. . So their difference in the first two places of the race remained at 38 minutes.

Today’s test from Al Qaeda to Riyadh was the longest and toughest of this year’s race in Saudi Arabia at 465 km. Towards the last part of the special stage, at the 8th time control point, Carlos Sainte with the electric Audi RS Q e-tron took over the lead from Hank Lategan from Toyota – but he didn’t want to keep it.

A broken link on the post forced him to slow down and Razid Al Razi took the lead, landing behind Al Attiyah for the first 14 seconds. However, the Saudi from Overdrive lost the day’s victory a little later and received a 2-minute penalty for exceeding the speed limit on the one-way route to the camp.

Lategan stopped at kilometer 310 with a problem with the right rear wheel, while Audi’s other star Stefan Petrancell also stopped with a broken suspension – which he caused himself from a jump like on the first day after a violent landing. The Frenchman was eliminated from the battle for victory from the start after losing 26 minutes.

The bad news for Audi today, when Matthias Ekström lost more than 40 minutes with unconfirmed problems in the third car of the German team. Saint is now in the highest position of the general from the trio with the electric RS Q e-tron: in 18th place, with a difference of 2:20 hours to Al Attiya.

On two wheels, on the other hand, the fight holds up well – and is exciting. Honda’s Joan Barreda Bort returned from an unfortunate accident yesterday and won his second qualifying run of the year and the 28th of his Dakar career.

With him, the star of the day was former MotoGP star Danilo Petrucci, who was doing his 3rd year at KTM from Tech 3. The Italian was only 7 minutes slower than Barreda Bort and showed how sad it was that his cell phone was lost yesterday – along with his wallet and belongings – cost him too much time when he had a problem with the phone yesterday in the 3rd Special Gas pump stopped and his team couldn’t call to tell him what to do.

Petrucci, having had a broken ankle since his preparation, was the fastest of them all in the first three stages. But then Barreda took over Bort and started building a void. In the end, the Spanish counterpart in the Honda Pablo Quintaniya plant also managed to overtake Petrucci and make it into the third year.

GasGas Managing Director Sam Sunderland finished sixth, but the most important thing was that he finished the day 1:30 minutes ahead of Matthias Walkner and almost 5 minutes ahead of Adrien van Beveren with the factory KTM and Yamaha.

As a result, Sunderland was able to extend its lead in the overall standings from yesterday’s 4 seconds to 3 minutes today and Walkner moved up to second place, leaving Van Beveren 1:54 minutes behind.

One of the unlucky ones of the day is Daniel Saunders from GasGas, who lost almost 8 minutes against Sunderland and 17:30 against Barreda Bort. Without his current problems, the Australian could have threatened his GasGas colleague for the lead – as the organizers canceled the 10-minute penalty imposed on him in the second qualifying round. Instead, he ended up staying in 4th place seven minutes away.

As for the Greek participation, Vangelis Bersis and Fotis Koutsoumpos entered the 4th special stage of the race today in 87th place overall in the Classic category, due to the inevitable penalties caused by the persistent problems with the instrument that the average Hourly value measures, caused speed and calculates the passenger together with the navigation. However, they preserved the Mitsubishi Pajero quite well for the difficult continuation – as only a third of the race was completed today.