Ricky Brabec clinches final stage victory at South African Safari Rally

Today was quite good as we won the stage with Ricky, although it was disappointing for Adrien to experience problems with the road book tablet and Skyler also lost a little bit of time in one area to finish in sixth.
This rally was not perfect for our riders, Tosha crashed on the first day, Ricky had some problems and crashed on the marathon stage, Adrien also suffered with the navigation issues today and for Skyler, the terrain was not was he was used to, so the first few days were difficult for him to have the best set up. Overall, though it was good for Ricky to finish on the podium at this rally. Now we need to focus on Portugal in September, I hope Tosha recovers quickly and is back to full fitness soon. We will keep working to have a better result there.

The day was good and the whole rally was pretty fun too. There was a lot of grass track racing, corners, fences and quick navigation to totally throw you off, so overall I’m happy to be at the finish line. Today we made a good push, it was a kind of difficult stage as it was only 111 km, but it was full ISDE Six Days style with the grass and the trees. We did a good job today, we pushed really big and really hard. We got some time back today but unfortunately we were just one minute shy of second on the podium ,so we’ll have to accept third for this rally and go and get them at the next one.

Well we made it to the finish line of the Safari Rally, it was a really fun event, a good experience and my first time here in South Africa. The organisation did a really good job of putting in a lot of effort, my team did an excellent job and my mechanic Mario, gave me a perfect bike for the entire week. I’m super happy to be a part of this team, everyone puts in so much effort. I didn’t nail it the first couple of stages and it hurt me on my times, but the last couple of days I was much better. I’ve just got to get back to work and that’s exactly what I’m doing, going to a nice training camp and working on some fitness, some bike speed and things like that. Then we go straight back to rally mode with navigation training and working on developing the rally bike to make it the best bike in the world. I’m looking forward to a very busy summer with the team and getting ready for Portugal, which is the next round and then Morocco and then it’ll be Dakar.

It was a tough day. I attacked a lot at the beginning, I felt good on the bike and was confident. At about 70 km into the stage my road book tablet froze. I had a red cross on the screen which showed there was an issue. I didn’t know how to solve it and tried to continue looking for the tracks, but there was a lot of grass so I couldn’t see them. I stopped because I didn’t know where to go and then I finally got the tablet to work again and was able to continue. It was a big amount of time lost, but it’s part of rally now I guess, so we’ll have to accept the situation and look forward to the next race.