Dakar: BMW stage 9 report

Three hard days the X-raid Team 210 of the original 400 competitors, 75 of which were cars, started at the half-way point of the 2004 Dakar this morning. The difficult stages of the preceding days have thus left their mark on the field of ...

Three hard days the X-raid Team

210 of the original 400 competitors, 75 of which were cars, started at the half-way point of the 2004 Dakar this morning. The difficult stages of the preceding days have thus left their mark on the field of participants.

Today's special stage, with a length of 736 kilometres, was the longest of this year's Dakar to be completed. The, to the experienced Dakar-participants, already well-known sites such as the Spring of Aratoue, the Rocher des Éléphants (elephant rocks) or the Enji-Pass were driven by today on the way from Tidjikja to Nema.

"I have driven for 10 hours and 40 minutes and I am knackered," said Luc Alphand after crossing the finish line in Nema. "And it was right, left, right, left, whole the time. At the beginning, we drove through rocks until Tichit and then in the middle of undergrowth. Yesterday, we had a small problem with the turbo on the engine which we managed to fix. But today, this slowed us down because we loss a bit of power out of the engine. We had two punctures including a slow one and I only got into sixth gear once. It was not our day!"