José Ignacio Cornejo confirms Dakar leadership with an excellent marathon stage

Today was the second part of the marathon. We did good today. We did good yesterday. We opened the whole stage. Nacho caught me around refuelling at kilometre 229. The second part of the special was 115 km. Nacho and I rode together and just worked it out with good team work. We went really fast. Yesterday we did well, but I was scared that we would have to open. We rode well today. I’m kicking myself in the head. I wish we’d had the speed and the focus last week. We are fighting and we are stronger now. There’s four days left. It’s the same part of the desert that helped me last year. Hopefully somewhere we can pull out time. There’s four days and a lot of things will change. Everyone has used tyres. Tyre cuts are going to be a factor. Bike fatigue. Rider fatigue. Everything is going to start playing in. The finish is really close. It’s not that close in kilometres. There’s four days left. Let’s try and keep the focus and push.

Today I came second behind my partner and friend Ricky and it has tough to catch him up. He was opening very fast and I finally caught him and we opened the track at a very good pace. Congratulations to Ricky because he did very well. The idea was not to win, but it was very difficult to keep the other riders in check behind as they were very far from us. Now, I’ve got a bit of an advantage over the second-placed rider overall but the times are still very tight, so we have to continue with the same concentration. We will try to finish the job well, tomorrow we will try to open as cleanly as we can, and drop as little time as possible.

In the second part of the marathon stage, I started from behind trying to look after the bike and finish well in these final stages. Yesterday, I had a very good stage, I was going to win but in the end I lost about 10 minutes which is why I came out pushing hard today. This stage was not to make much differences as it was a very fast stage. The truth is that I didn’t really enjoy these two marathon stages over very fast and broken-up terrain. Now, the important thing is that the bike is fine and tomorrow we have to continue more focused than ever to give it our best shot over the final four days.

The second part of the marathon stage was quite difficult. There were tracks with a lot of rocks and the truth is that it was dangerous. Yesterday, I took a strong blow to the front wheel and that is why today I decided to take care of things. At refuelling I realized that the gaps were small and I tried to keep a stable pace. I also saw Xavier De Soultrait fall and I lost my concentration there a little and I lost a bit of time over the next few kilometres. The result is not bad at all because tomorrow we start from further back, so we will try to make up some time.