Schareina and Brabec climb the standings as Van Beveren withdraws from Rally Raid Portugal

We have arrived at the Badajoz bivouac, however, Adrien crashed this morning at around the 187km mark, as he arrived too fast into a corner. He is in a lot of pain in his whole body, his shoulder is a bit damaged but luckily he has escaped serious injury. He won’t ride tomorrow as he needs to recover for the Dakar. Tosha did a really good job today to finish in second, just four seconds behind Daniel Sanders. That gives Tosha the opportunity tomorrow to start three minutes behind Daniel and if he goes well he can do a good stage and get back time to Daniel. This is the goal, so let’s see if it can happen. Ricky also had a strong consistent stage and finished third, so he will also benefit from a good starting position tomorrow. Skyler had a small problem with the GPS antenna on his bike, but he finished 6th on terrain that isn’t the best for him.

Today was a Dakar style stage as it was such a long day, 11 hours on the bike. It’s tough on the body but here we are, we made it to Spain. Tomorrow, we have a loop around here and then we’re back to Portugal the next day. I started the morning off with obviously brand new tyres and ended the day with slicks. The last couple of specials, here in Spain, were like riding on ice, so I’m happy to make it to here and not to drop the bike as it was super sketchy out there, I was a little nervous, so I just put the bike in a high gear and just lugged it around so I didn’t hit the ground. So far the rally’s going good, I’m happy with where we’re at and there’s just three days more to go, so let’s keep moving forward.

Today was a really long day in the saddle, we left the bivouac super early in the morning and we started this special before the sun even came up. It was a crazy day today, I had to manage myself and the bike, just a few issues out there that I needed to make sure to control and keep moving forward. I had one issue out there, one mistake on my end where I ended up in a canal for about a minute and a half, that kind of sucked. But I kept it more or less clean after that and rode well. I’m happy to make it through this day, it was treacherous and really dangerous out there, so to be here at the finish of this one, I can now look forward to the next.

Today was the longest stage of the rally with more than 400 km against the clock to ride. It wasn’t so bad, it was a combination of between really fast pistes, some tricky mountain sections and many roadbook notes. I tried to push from the beginning and finished in second, just four seconds behind Daniel. The last 50 km was super super slippery, like ice, but this is part of the game so we’ll go for it tomorrow.