Nani Roma takes on the Dakar without tires: “My heart almost reached 2,000 points. It was like a stone breaking just by looking at it.”

Nani Roma He finished stage 3 of Dakar 2026 with his co-pilot and a big smile on his face. Alex Haro. With a sense of relief. I sigh in the car. Especially for being so calm and navigating a difficult vote in a situation where you knew you could have lost all your chances of winning. dakar. I had two punctures with 80 kilometers left. The second was an area with a lot of stones, which he still had to pass. “My heart was beating 2,000 degrees,” he said when asked by a doctor at the Dakar bivouac.

But this race is like that. He suffered, underwent surgery, prayed to all the gods that he wouldn’t get a flat tire again, and even celebrated the great result of being able to harness his immense power. A waste of time for rivals for the crown, including Quintero, Loeb, and Al-Attiyah. And also, in life, This second puncture allowed him to delay his starting position on the difficult stage 4, allowing him to improve his time compared to starting at the front. If I had won the stage.

now, Nani Roma faces a difficult fourth stagestart of marathon stage (no mechanical assistance at the end of the day) 5th place overall with 4’02”I know that starting sixth in the fourth stage will mean losing time compared to Nasser and Loeb, who have a very slow start, but it will allow me to follow in the footsteps of my rivals.

“Everything is very complicated here. The reality is you don’t know the strategy, the start order, where you’re going to go. Yesterday I started from the back, but I knew it was going to be a good stage. Tomorrow (in the fourth stage) I had no intention of starting from the front,” he said.

“But in the end, you pulled over, I pulled over, we got two flat tires and lost the wheel (without a spare tire). There’s a lot of emotional ups and downs, but at the end of the day it’s important to enjoy the moment and have fun for hours, because tomorrow everything could change.” Tomorrow is the marathon stage, so it’s going to be a tough two days. ” So said the Folgerol pilot.

“In the end, I talked about it with Alex at the rink and it wasn’t so bad after all, right? It’s always painful when you get a puncture. It was complicated, especially at 80 kilometers, because it was the worst situation where I lost my spare wheel, and that’s when I got the puncture.” What was that like? Stones, stones everywhere, and even when there is no spare wheel, it looks more stones than it actually is. ”said the two-time Dakar champion (once on a motorcycle and once in a car).

“I was a little surprised by the stones in Stage 3. Yes, apart from that, they were the kind of stones that would cut just by looking at them. It’s very difficult, very difficult. To really pick up the pace, understand how you have to drive, try to brake in a straight line… difficult, difficult,” he stressed.

Did you think you could escape Dakar?

“Of course, we had another puncture there and had to wait for a tire… We lost a lot of time, but we coped well. We knew how to take the breaks we needed, how to slow down, and we knew we lost a few minutes on those kilometers, for sure. But at least we drove in survival mode, as they say. Our hearts weren’t at 1,000, or even 2,000. It’s terrible stress.”

“When something like that happens in your car, it’s a lot of stress, but in the end you know everything worked out.”

He knows in stage 4 he has to give it time.

“Tomorrow I will have to lose time (starting the stage in 6th place and there is no trace of the bike). As usual, I will lose time tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I will try to make up. But the goal for me is to try not to have anything happen tomorrow, not to break the car, not to have any more punctures. ‘And the goal for me is this, to run a clean stage tomorrow.’ And I’m not really concerned about what I’m going to lose in time, because I’m going to lose, and the day after tomorrow I’ll be able to make up, in other words, I have to run as clean a stage as possible tomorrow.

How much time did Nasser and Loeb lose?

“What happened is today I came in trying to win the stage because I wanted to get a lot of time from them and if you look at the times, the reality is that we were able to get a lot of time from them (rivals) and that’s what we want. But sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to, and in the end, you know, we ended up starting in a not-so-bad position because of the two punctures. We’re right in the middle and we’re going to move up in the rankings.”

“So we raced and we competed well. Actually, with Alex (Haro, co-driver) we competed well and we knew how to deal with the difficult moments in the last 80 kilometers, so I was happy.”

In the Stones he remembered the Dakar coach…

“As a matter of fact, I said to David[Castella, director of Dakar]: “Oh, David, do we need to look for these stones?” He said, “I can’t find any other place to go.” Of course, when we find ourselves in a situation like that, we think of David a lot, and sometimes we think of family members. It also reminds me of, No, yeah, the reality is they’re doing it the best way they can, thinking the stage is going to work out. And I’m not blaming anyone for anything, but it’s true. When you’re in the middle of a stone without wheels, you’re like, “Oh, maybe I should have gone somewhere else.” But there was nothing, that’s the way it is. If everyone passes through the same place, they will see tomorrow.”

Would I have signed to reach stage 4 this way?

“It’s the Dakar and you sign something in the Dakar. What I always sign is to overcome problems. The best thing about the Dakar is when you get into chaos, you have the ability to minimize time loss at any cost. That’s what we’ve tried to do.”