Monster Energy Honda HRC riders keep pace amid dusty conditions

Tosha and Adrien had picked some good starting positions for today, although they both were eager to get the rally properly started after the long summer break. After a few kilometres they were back on fine form and they did well today with Adrien finishing in second and Tosha in third. They’ll start tomorrow just behind Daniel Sanders and I think they’ll be able to come away again with a good result. Ricky and Skyler started further back and they had a lot of dust to contend with, with Ricky losing some time behind riders as he spent the entire stage in the dust. He finished sixth, however, I believe he can do better tomorrow with larger gaps between riders. Skyler was also keen to get the stage started and he did well today in seventh. Tomorrow’s stage two will be quick at the beginning, the middle section will be quite technical and the final run will be in Spain on hard pack, so we will see how they get on.

It was a long day, I spent, I’d say, the whole day in the dust. The times are good, not the best, but looking forward to tomorrow. I don’t think we will have as much dust, the start gap will be three minutes, so it won’t be as difficult as it was today. Battling dust with the guys in front of me was tough, but it is what it is and with four days left, let’s see what we can do.

We’ve tackled day one of the Portugal Rally, it was slippery and dusty and our rear starting position of 11th wasn’t really ideal. I got caught behind a couple of guys that really dusted me out for a while, but I think everyone kind of had the same situation out there. The dust was brutal for everyone. I had a clean run, not perfect of course, but I rode well, I felt fine out there on the bike and I had a lot of fun so that’s what matters. We had to repeat the prologue again backwards and it was much better today, they’d made it all flat, watered it and then we were first out so we could make the lines out there. That was much more fun, but I think the rest of this race is going to get pretty interesting with the tyres. Everyone is smoking their tyres and some of these guys chose to run knobby tyres, so we’ll see how this week shapes up, it might shake some things up a little bit and make the racing really exciting.

It was nice stage, it was really slippery in parts, much more than last year because it hasn’t rained here for a long time, so everything is so dry and very different from what we experienced last year with all the rain. I had to adapt my riding as I got caught up in a lot of dust up early on in the stage behind one of the newcomers. When he could finally let me pass, I could push and ride better. I’m happy, I had fun and I had a good time on the bike, which was really good in these conditions.

It was really good, we had a really slippery, fast piste during the first 200km. After that the last part was sandy, it was the same section of yesterday’s prologue, so it was slightly destroyed after the cars went through. I tried to push from the beginning but I didn’t feel comfortable during the first part of the stage. I think we have a good place to start from tomorrow, we will see how easy the navigation is and how much dust there will be and try and catch the riders in front.