Brabec strikes back to regain Dakar lead ahead of final stage

It was a tough day for the riders and the team. We were all a bit nervous because it was a crucial day for the final stage results. Ricky did an amazing job, he really pushed hard. Yesterday, his plan was to finish behind Luciano, which he did and today he rode brilliantly to win the stage. He now holds a 3 minutes 20 seconds overall advantage. Tomorrow, he will start three minutes ahead of Luciano and if everything goes well and he avoids mistakes, he has a strong chance to win the Dakar for the third time. But there’s still another day of racing, and he’s fully focused on taking that top step.
Tosha started ahead of Ricky today, but we instructed him to keep an eye on him, as we didn’t want Ricky in his dust. He rode well to reach Yanbu and has built enough of a gap to stay on the provisional podium.
Adrien quickly found his rhythm on the stage, opening the way with Skyler, though he ran into some tricky navigation and finished fourth. Still, it was a strong performance. Skyler led the stage from the start, a tough task, but finished seventh. The result moves him up to fourth overall, and if he holds that position tomorrow, it will be an excellent result for him.
The team is motivated, focused and we are prepared for stage 12 + 1, as I don’t like to say 13!

I tried to ride carefully but took many risks today to make a good push. With one day to go we’re looking really good, so I’m really happy about this. I think last night was probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had since the rally started. We have a late start tomorrow so I might be able to stay awake until 8.30pm tonight, so we’ll see. We’ve still got one day to go, Luciano has been riding really well through the whole rally, so I got to give it up to him, we’ve been fighting every single day. It’s truly cool to see and I think people that are watching at home are really enjoying the results everyday because it’s so back and forth. It makes for good racing and it makes for good television.

Oh boy, I had a very eventful day today because I had a small gasket failure which started draining all of the oil out of the bike. Opening the special, I did more or less an OK job until the 100 km mark, Adrien took over and I just tried my best to not build any engine heat. I’m very happy to have moved up to fourth overall now, just by 10 seconds, but today was a miracle of a day to get in to the finish and I’m happy about that. We’ll see how this last 100 kms goes tomorrow.

It was a tough day, I made some navigation mistakes at the beginning and then I calmed down, needed to regroup and navigate perfectly. I caught up to Skyler around 55 km and then I opened for around 100 kms. In one place I turned around to find a good track and I saw Luciano’s light coming, so I let him pass as I wanted the battle to be fair. Then I rode behind him a bit but I had a lot of dust. At the refuelling we saw that Ricky was not far away, so I shut off after refuelling to let Ricky do his battle and not be in the middle and make him suffer with the dust. I’ve had a better feeling this week, so let’s keep focused for tomorrow again.

It was not easy today because there were so many stones, it was 300 kms of stones. I did a little mistake of navigation at the beginning. It’s so good to have a teammate leading overall and to have two Hondas on the podium is always so cool. For sure, after two weeks of racing in Saudi Arabia, it’s always good to line up for the last stage. There’s 100 kms, anything can happen because this is Dakar, but I think everything will be good.