Tosha Chalayna said of her punishment: “It’s not serious, but it’s very serious. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a bigger penalty than skipping a speed check. Even my rivals said it didn’t make sense.”

Tosha Shalaynathe day after the sanctions that prevented victory. Dakar Rally 2026“It makes no sense,” he said, speaking forcefully about the penalty he considers extremely serious. Fortunately for the Honda man, Mr Saunders still has options due to the sanction he received for exceeding the speed limit. He is fourth overall, 11 minutes 56 seconds behind the Australian.

Although he did not throw in the towel, he did complain about the 10-minute penalty he received late in the marathon due to a poor starting process, which could seriously damage his hopes of winning the title. touareg Two-wheeled winner.

“Well, of course, I think I’m there. It was a sanction for not even knowing the rules. I don’t think anyone would impose even 10 minutes, but that doesn’t make sense. But my competitors, even.” Daniel, who was fighting alongside him, said it didn’t make sense.. But that’s part of the game, right? We have to accept it and try to recover in the second week,” he told the media.

“No, actually, it was outside a special place. It was when we came out of the bivouac. We were sleeping in a tent so it wasn’t a normal ivac. It was night, so we couldn’t even see. These panels are sometimes even lying on the ground or in the air. After all. By the way, the distance between them is not always the same, sometimes they are several hundred meters from each other, and sometimes they are very close. So, after all, it’s a stupid rule. ”Here they said, “I didn’t know either,” and I myself realized the mistake.

”Not serious, very serious. It makes no sense. The penalty is greater than skipping a speed check in the middle of a special program where you are gaining time. There’s no point in that and like I said, even my competitors told me it wasn’t fair. ”

Sanders as a rival

Daniel Sanders will be tough to beat. If it weren’t for the six-minute penalty he received, he would have had half the Dakar in his pocket. We were about to leave Chaleina, which is 18 minutes away. world. Despite being left alone among those 12, Tosha recognizes the difficulty of overcoming the sanctions against the KTM man.

“Hey, it’s not going to be easy. I already know that. When you’re on the bike now, you know that we fight for every second of every day. Some days you lose two minutes, and the other day you’ve already gained them back and you’re always there. But don’t give up. That’s the motivation. We’ve only raced six days and the prologue, but there’s still seven days left, which means more than half the rally. Anything can happen and of course we’re going to try. ”

“I felt very comfortable because I was fighting every minute with Daniel and Ricky every day. But I’m happy because I was comfortable. In the opening, there were days where I was pushing when I needed to be pushing, but I was able to control the race very well. And now I’m going to have to change the chip a little bit to get those 10 minutes back and get back into the fight.”

stage before break

To end the first week, this Friday’s stage was quite complex for everyone considering the weight given to navigation. It wasn’t easy for Shalayna, but she saved the day with a good position in second place.

“I tried it from start to finish. To be honest, I expected it to be a little slower since there were so many dunes, but it was very fast.. There were a lot of directions to go, but the first 80km was 30km of dunes and the rest was very fast. I knew from the prologue that I was losing time on fast days on the sand, so today’s mission was to try to take in all the time I could, but that didn’t work out. ”

“If the stage is straight, not technical, just fast, we’re losing a little more time there. But, well, I think it’s the only dune stage we have in this rally. We tried, but, well, with this penalty to Saunders, he can’t get away anymore. Yeah, we lost a little over a minute with Ricky, and we recovered about four minutes from Luciano. So we’re not fourth yet, but we’re closer to the podium.”