Dakar 2024 – Sébastien Loeb relieved despite a few glitches: “There was a way to lose everything”

It's not ideal, but perhaps it's better to start the 2024 Dakar this way. Rather than attacking excessively, Sébastien Loeb and Fabian Lurquin (Bahrain Raid Xtreme) experienced a first “inside” stage. The Franco-Belgian pair conceded around twenty minutes on the winner Guillaume de Mévius (Toyota) and his dolphin Carlos Sainz (Audi), this Saturday January 6.

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Here's @SebastienLoeb in action on Stage 1 🚗

The @BRaidXtreme driver finished 20th in the Stage after a puncture, +22'47" down on winner Guillaume De Mevius ⏱ # Dakar2024 pic.twitter.com/PEMGpjnIt7

- DAKAR RALLY (@dakar) January 6, 2024

The Alsatian was notably the victim of a puncture, and a mishmash concerning the radio communication system between him and his navigator Fabian Lurquin. A concern that does not date from yesterday, but that Prodrive has clearly had all the problems in the world to resolve for three years!

“We finished the special, that was the first goal. It was a horrible special. There was no steering, you had to drive over rocks all the time, all the time. We had a radio problem at first, we managed to switch to another radio 2 system.

We had a puncture around km 70. Once again, we had a puncture without knowing why. It was a moderately slow puncture. We will see why (at the bivouac). We changed the wheel, then got into the car. As we had plugged our headsets into radio 2, I couldn't find my radio wire, so we detached ourselves again, to look for the wire lying at the bottom of the cabin. »

Then, a reliability concern (again) caused another untimely shutdown of the Hunter T1+. “At around km 240, a rear toe link broke. It had to be changed. That's 15 minutes wasted, all things considered. But I'm happy to be there, there was a way to lose everything. It took place in volcanic stones, with lots of small tracks crisscrossing. When I had a puncture at km 60, I said to myself: “damn, this is a bad start”, knowing that the second part of the stage was going to be very rough, with a lot of stones…”