Al Attiyah triumphant step after Leb’s new problems

Dakar rally champion Nasser Al Attiyah extended his lead to 49 minutes, although he completed his 10th year in the 6th race on Friday because a navigation error cost Sebastian Leb 25 minutes.

In the 348-kilometer race around Riyadh, Toyota was initially in charge of Nasser Al Attiyah, but inexplicably lost control in the second third of the special. Bahrain Raid Xtreme’s Orlando Teranova took the lead and took the opportunity.

Yazd Al Razi from Overdrive Toyota took advantage of Leb’s wrong orientation. In his third year he overtook the nine-time French WRC world champion in second place in the overall standings. Razi is now 48:54 minutes behind Al Attiyah, Leb 50:25 minutes.

Behind Teranova, the Argentine with the Prodrive buggy, who took his first victory in the Special after 2015, Matthias Ekstrom succeeded in the second year with the third Audi RS Q e-tron. With his best result in Dakar, the Swede is now hoping to make it into the top ten in the second week of the match, while Carlos Sainth and Stefan Petrancell were eliminated after the numerous problems of the previous days. In fact, the Spaniard lost another 40 minutes with unconfirmed problems.

On the motorcycles, Sam Sunderland from GasGas slightly increased his lead over Matthias Walkner from KTM to 2:39 minutes. The day wouldn’t change the differences much anyway, because the 421 special trip around Riyadh was drastically shortened to 101 kilometers.

This was because cars had made this route on Thursday, leaving the crossings of the wild Arabian terrain quite damaged, making it dangerous for motorbikes. The heavy rain that followed that night made it worse and so the organization closed the ED on 101st kilometer.

The first year of the day was scored by Daniel Saunders, with the other factory GasGas with a difference of 2:26 minutes to Sunderland, while the Briton was 10 seconds faster than Walkner.

With this achievement, the Australian finally entered the battle for victory after passing into 3rd place for General Adrien van Beveren of Yamaha. The Frenchman celebrated his eighth year on Friday, losing 4 minutes on Saunders and about a minute and a half on Sunderland and Welkner. With a difference of 7:23 minutes to the top, the quartet of drivers with realistic hopes for victory next week will remain.

Van Beveren’s Yamaha factory colleague Ross Brands had a much more unfortunate day because he fell early and had to be transported by road to the camp’s medical center in Riyadh. This year’s Revelation driver, Danilo Petrucci from Tech3 KTM, also had an accident. But the Italian made it through and finished in the 40th year.

The Greek crew Vangelis Bersis and Fotis Koutsoumbou started the day from 79th place in the classification of the Classic category, in which they had climbed the previous one. However, since the special for motorcycles and the Classic class was significantly reduced on Thursday because a sandstorm prevented rescue helicopters from flying, they had no chance of winning more seats – although everything is going very well for them in terms of navigation and driving style.