Tunisia: Vigouroux in the spotlight

“Today, the key was the tires,” said Eric Vigouroux at the finish line, after 288 km of fast and stony tracks. “You really had to have confidence in your tires to attack without restraint. On the fast sections, our Trophy Truck does not shine with its top speed, but we compensated in the rough parts. » Eric dedicated this stage victory to his supplier, Toyo Tires, and declared himself ready to continue attacking in the following days?

No doubt already racing with the aim of scoring points at the FIA ​​World Cup, the Russian Leonid Novitskiy did not look too hard for performance, and ranked second in the stage. In the general classification, the BMW X3 CC of the X-Raid team was in the lead this evening.

Third on the stage, Christian Lavieille was half satisfied with his day: “this special was really not exciting, apart from the last 25 km. I expected something else. Otherwise, I noticed that our car has much better suspension than last year on the same terrain. The developments that we developed for the Dakar are really going in the right direction. »

The big loser of this stage was Jean-Louis Schlesser: “we had difficulty overtaking a biker, who could not hear our ??Sentinel??, and to overtake him, we had to go off the track: result, we had a puncture and we lost five minutes. » In the general classification, Schlesser is now fourth, with 9:40?? delay.

A very good duel began for sixth place between the buggies of Lethier (team Schlesser) and Chabot (team SMG), the two men being separated by only a second! As for Thomasse, who stopped for almost a quarter of an hour due to a puncture, he dropped to ninth place.
Finally, in the T2 category, it is the Frenchman from Dubai, Laurent Rosso, who is in the lead at the wheel of his Nissan Pathfinder assisted by Team Dessoude.