Tosha Schareina triumphs in the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge prologue

The 11km prologue is done, it was a completely different kind of terrain from what we’ll expect over the next five days. It was quite technical with hard pack and some stones and for Monster Energy Honda HRC it was a good prologue overall. Tosha had very good speed and confidence on the Honda CRF450 RALLY, his physical condition on this first test was good and the collarbone was OK. He has a really good position to start tomorrow too.
Our second rider was Ricky Brabec who finished in third, he also felt positive on the bike as the set up worked well for him and he will also have a good start position tomorrow. He needs to focus as it’s an important stage for him. Skyler finished sixth after some big improvements with the bike after Dakar, today he was confident and I’m hopeful he can do a good Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge. Adrien finished eighth, it was not the best day for him as he made a mistake missing a waypoint and lost some time. His start tomorrow won’t be ideal, however he is a good navigator and can open well and not lose too much time. Tomorrow is the first stage, so we will manage each day as it comes.

The first day of competition here in Abu Dhabi is done, it’s only the prologue with a short 11km special, however, it feels good to get some race speed under our belts before the real race starts. We’re third in the prologue so that means we get a pretty good start position for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it, it’s going to be a good five days in the sandbox, so hopefully we will have a really good result at the end of this.

The prologue was nice because it was hard pack with some rocks and ditches, but it was short and there were a lot of really close notes and turns together. They put these waypoints called the WPP, which is very, very hard to hit and manage, so you have to stay on the mark. It was a little bit too difficult to go with the navigation, to look at the road book and also look at where you were going and so I kind of blew a couple of corners out there which lost some seconds. I’m in an OK position for the start for tomorrow and we’ve got five more days of racing of dunes ahead of us.

Not the best prologue we could get. I missed one waypoint and I discovered that at the next corner, my GPS showed that I’d missed it so I decided to turn back and try to find it. I did maybe one kilometre back, found the waypoint and carried on again, but in this short 11km it has cost a lot of time. This is not the best start of the race, I’m quite frustrated with my mistake but we will look ahead and for sure give the best from tomorrow.

It was pretty good, but from the beginning I realised that the terrain wasn’t so easy to ride as it was slippery in some parts and the navigation was tricky too. I tried to push from the beginning and to focus on the navigation, ride smooth and get the win. The focus will now be on the stages ahead because the real race starts tomorrow.