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Two punctures and a breakdown have interfered with Carlos Sainz's path to his fourth Dakar Rally.
If the distance that separated him from the leader of the general classification, the always patient Stéphane Peterhansel, was already great, it is even more so this Tuesday after the ninth stage, the first that the Frenchman has won.
The most effective victory in a week and a half of competition, on the other hand.
The Mini driver put the direct and managed to prevail in a fast stage: 465 kilometers between tracks and pipes, which he completed in 4 hours and 50 minutes.
"Every minute matters," he said the day before.
And this Mars has made his vision of the race count.
Especially because it was a very difficult day for his two direct rivals, his teammate Sainz and Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah (Toyota).
While the Qatari deviated from the course and ended up puncturing up to two times - he ended up with only one spare tire to complete the last kilometers -, the Spaniard spliced one bad news after another.
A puncture at the start of the special and another when he tried to cut the minutes lost due to that setback were combined with a fault in the brake system.
Between one thing and another he lost 22 minutes, which leaves him more than an hour behind Peterhansel in the general classification while Al-Attiyah is just under 18 minutes.
🚨Make way, Mr. Dakar coming through! @ S_peterhansel # Dakar2021 pic.twitter.com/ON7tMxvmQR
- DAKAR RALLY (@dakar) January 12, 2021
The ninth stage, which was considered by many to be one of the trickiest of this 43rd edition of the Dakar, was thus a blow for Monsieur Dakar's rivals.
Especially for Sainz.
It rains in the wet in the Madrid box.
That he saw the race slip away in stage three when he lost 35 minutes due to a bad reading of the road book and another fifteen minutes after two days.
Today he feels that the Frenchman has passed sentence in this loop around the city of Neom.
Now he can really start to consider himself a "spectator", as he said the day before.