Tosha Schareina powers through for back-to-back stage wins

After yesterday’s great prologue result with Tosha and Ricky, they had an advantage today and were able to start the stage further back after choosing their start positions. We’ve started this rally with victory on the prologue and now can add victory on the first stage too with first and second places for Tosha and Ricky. They rode well today with good pace and navigation and their Honda CRF450 RALLY bikes ran well too. Adrien had a difficult day, he had to open almost all the stage and the time bonuses of half a second per kilometre was not enough for this stage that had many dunes and sand, so he lost quite important time. I’m happy with his navigation and his pace so I hope tomorrow, by starting further back that he can recover some time. Skyler missed a dune at the beginning so had a bit of wrist pain so he finished in eighth, but I believe tomorrow he can also recover time to be back in the fight for the podium.
Tomorrow we’ll have two riders, Tosha and Ricky opening the stage, with Adrien and Skyler further back, so we will try to strategise to have a good result on stage two.

We got a really good result on stage one, we ended up second so it’s pretty cool. I’m happy we’ve made good adjustments to the bike last week during testing, so, so far so good. With four days left hopefully we can keep this momentum going forward and end up in a good position at the end.

Today was a good challenge, the stage was pretty fast. I’m trying to update the bike settings and gain more confidence on it, so that’s my goal out here, to keep making adjustments and get more and more comfortable on the machine. Today I had a couple of moments out there that slowed me down a little bit, but overall it was a good day. I made it to the finish line and I’m happy and ready to take on another four days.

It was a good day overall, I started second but got into the lead around 45km then I opened the rest of the stage. Michael Docherty caught up with me and we opened together. The pace was high and it was good to ride with him. I think the pace was right, the time gap is big but in this kind of terrain you obviously lose a lot when you open, so I’m happy with my day.

I’m finally here at the finish line of the first stage and won it so I’m super happy for that. I thought the terrain would be more hard-packed for this first stage, but from the start I noticed that it was completely sand and dunes. I tried to push from the beginning and the second part was pretty sketchy amongst the dunes. Tomorrow I have that difficult mission to open the stage so I will just have to go for it.