Rally of Morocco – Sébastien Loeb’s crazy chase on the 1st stage

He overtook so many vehicles on this 1st stage of the Rally du Morocco 2024 that it is impossible to establish an exact number of overruns. Sébastien Loeb (Dacia), forced to start in 120th position following a broken suspension triangle during the Prologue the day before, put in extra effort to finish in a very respectable 12th place, 12 minutes behind his winning teammate, Nasser Al-Attiyah.

When he got out of his 4x4 in Zagora, the Alsatian didn't even have a face full of dust! "I was lucky, most of the trucks stopped to let me pass", he confides. Launched into the attack, Loeb and his co-driver Fabian Lurquin saw the temperature rise inside the cockpit. An evil that the 2nd of the Dakar 2024 had spoken about before the start of the event.

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"The temperature was limited, but there was no real problem." On the mechanical side, another concern was raised by Sébastien Loeb: the shock absorbers. "We lost gas in some shock absorbers," he continues. "The car was very, very soft, so I had to be careful in the dips and in the breaks. The Dacia is rather "comfortable" overall, but a little too soft for the dips, so I had to be a little defensive in these places."

Such behaviour was not highlighted by the other two drivers of the team, Nasser Al-Attiyah and Cristina Gutiérrez. But the Qatari and the Spaniard started from 28th and 7th place, and benefited from a less hollowed ground, therefore less demanding for the mechanics. "I heated the shock absorbers more than the other riders in the team because it was broken up", judges Loeb. To top it all off, a broken connecting rod in a contact with an SSV lost in the dunes gave the Loeb-Lurquin duo a final scare. The road to the final finish scheduled for Friday is still long…

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