Van Beveren bounces back as Dakar Rally action resumes

It was a long stage with really fast pistes, some tricky road book notes and also a big liaison. Ricky opened the road today, but he made two quite big navigation mistakes, so Tosha managed to catch him. Tomorrow, I think he is in a good position to start what will be a long stage again. Setting off in second, Tosha also made some mistakes, it was enough for Sanders to catch him and near the end of the stage he made another mistake with Ricky. It was really tough out there because of the dust. I think he too has a good starting position tomorrow. Skyler rode a strong stage, although he got a bit lost near the beginning of the stage which lost some time, but he did a good pace and arrived at the end with a strong fifth position. Adrien felt much better after the rest day as he had time to recover from his crash in the first week. He started further back today but rode a consistent stage to finish in third. Tomorrow is a long stage, it’ll be a mix of terrain and also fast. Let’s see if they can recover time as we continue to fight.

It was not so tricky of a day but we did lose a little bit of time. No stress on my end, I mean tomorrow we’re in a really good position to claw back some time. For now, we’re doing all we can, we’re riding, having fun, we’re navigating, but hopefully tomorrow we can do a good job and make a good push and then we have the marathon camp, which takes its toll on tyres and things like that. Tomorrow’s looking good for us, we’re in a good position to have a solid day on what I think is one of the biggest stages of the rally, so for me it’s better to start at the back.

It was a full gas day, we were on the throttle stopper pretty much the majority of the stage. I had a couple of bits of tricky navigation, one of which I did a super strange thing, turned around to get a waypoint I’d already got. I had to get the juices going after rest day, as I definitely needed it.

It was a much better day, mainly because I enjoyed my riding. It was a very very fast stage, like towards the end it was only flat out, straight, full gas. At the beginning we had some nice dunes, some sand sections and I’m happy, mainly because I enjoyed that more than for the result itself. I’m thankful to the team for the job we’ve done on the rest day, we had some discussions with the engineers on how we could adapt the bike. We did some different suspension settings and it helped me a lot to feel better, so I’m looking forward to the coming days, getting into the same rhythm with the same feeling.

Today was not easy, we had 460 km of special and it was so so fast, we did it in like 3 hours 20. It was so windy, I tried to push from the beginning to catch up to Ricky around the 120 km mark. It was so dusty today too. After the refuelling I caught him and I did the second section out front to grab as much bonus time. But after the second refuelling a made a little mistake and Daniel was catching us. He passed us and then we were riding in the dust again. We made some navigation mistakes, so it wasn’t such a good day, but we have a good position for tomorrow.