Van Beveren storms stage 10 as Brabec takes Dakar Rally lead

What a stage today! A few months ago in Spain, David Castera said at the Dakar presentation that if you liked dunes, stage ten would be full of them and he was true to his word. There were kilometres of dunes: soft dunes, big dunes, all kinds of dunes.
For us, it was a good stage. Tosha had a tough job opening this long stage, but he rode well to finish sixth and climb back onto the podium in third place. Skyler isn’t a fan of dunes, he prefers hard-packed, stony terrain, but he rode a solid stage to finish fourth. Ricky started in a good position, but he caught the front runners early and had to ride alongside Tosha, which made it hard to build a gap. Still, he finished second and took the overall lead, achieving the goal. Adrien is a completely different rider from the first week. He’s riding much better and winning today’s tough stage was a fantastic victory. As for stage 11, we don’t know much yet, based on the map, it looks fast, so we’ll see how it unfolds.

The marathon stage was good overall. We got to sleep on the ground, under the stars, it was really cool. Overall, the two days was awesome, we did the best job we could and the outcome is pretty good. If we’re still in a good position for the next three days, we’ll just keep doing the best we can and we’ll keep plugging away. We made it back which is my main goal, my bike is in one piece, so for my mechanics it's super awesome. The times are super tight, I don’t know if I like it still, but it’s a good race I’m sure for the people watching. We’ll keep fighting, there's three days to go, hopefully at the end of this thing we’re in the position we want to be in.

Time and time again we’re seeing that the marathon stage is a key factor in this race. Yesterday, I did a much better job of managing, it was really rocky in the beginning and tricky navigation, so I more or less just chilled out and rode really easy, managed the bike, brought it in in a good position and also didn’t make any navigation mistakes. Today, I knew it was going to be really physically demanding. I rode normally, I didn’t go out of my comfort zone. Adrien passed me going full gas, I just let him go. I was riding my own race today and eventually we caught back up. They were opening the stage and it was really difficult to open in the big dunes so I was able to close the gap back up and I would consider this a really good stage, managed it, I rode my own race, had my own plan.

It was a good day to take the win. We had a lot of sand and this is my terrain, you know I really enjoy it. After the first week, where I had a few problems, it was not easy to regroup and be focused again and try to give my best, but I did it. This stage win is more than a stage win, it’s also a good result after trying to improve everything and get back to my real level.

It was not easy, we knew after yesterday that we were going to lose so much time today because it was full, soft dunes. From 80 km we were riding all together. After refuelling Daniel Sanders had a crash and we stopped with him to try and help. After that we were riding together until the end, over the dunes, trying to fight with the dust and to try and take advantage of taking all the bonus time. We are more or less back in the game, it will not be easy tomorrow or for the last three days, for sure it’s not a secret, we will continue to push.