Van Beveren marches on as Schareina takes a tumble

We have arrived in Haradh, the finish of stage nine and it was a good day for us. We had a different strategy for Tosha but he crashed hard 12km into the stage, luckily he could get going again and not lose too much time. Adrien finished second today which was a good result for him, Ricky and Skyler were fourth and fifth, they will have some tracks tomorrow that they can follow so they can push and try to catch some time.
Stage ten is a short 116km special stage with 95% dunes and 5% sand so I don’t think it will be a fast one, but it will still be very intense. After tomorrow, stage eleven will be really important so let’s see where the riders finish tomorrow before we plan for the remaining days.

Today was good, it was kind of a fast special and there wasn’t much to do today, it was more of a transfer day. I caught my teammate Tosha early on after his crash and we rode together the whole day. I’m happy with the ride and how things are going. There’s only a couple of days left to go, so I think for tomorrow we’re in a good position to gauge what’s going to happen and then go full attack on stage eleven. Nothing’s impossible and nothing’s out of sight. We just have to keep working at it.

Stage nine was probably one of the fastest ones of the whole rally, we were on the speed limiter at 160km/h for a lot of the day through the fast tracks. There was a lot of gravel, some big ditches and also some tricky navigation. Out in the zone they bulldozed these new roads, I think they’re out to look for oil or something and there’s a lot of the tracks out there, so it was very easy to get tripped up and think you were on a good track and that’s what happened to me after the refuelling. I had a really good stage going in the first half, clipping some minutes off and then I just kind of got stuck in this boulder like field, so I lost a couple of minutes there, but overall I had a pretty good stage, it was really fast and kind of my style. We’ve done this stage probably three or four times now, obviously some differences in there, but more or less the same zone, same kind of route. I’m always a fan of this one and I always seem to get caught out by this stuff, so I look forward to next time I’m in this zone when I can have a good run at it. It was a positive day in fifth, puts us in a good position to push on on a very long day in the saddle tomorrow as we head to the Empty Quarter.

It was again a very tough day with the navigation, the rough terrain had a lot of stones and we rode through some really destroyed places, canyons and riverbeds. I made some small mistakes in the navigation as I couldn’t find the piste, then I went off track in the stones and lost quite a bit of time. I then saw Luciano was on the gas so I had to push as well and I only caught him at the very end, but overall it was a good solid day. There are still many kilometres to go so I will give my best to the end.

Today, I had a big crash at the beginning, more or less after 20km. I then didn’t have too much visibility with the sand and the early morning light. After that, Ricky caught up with me and we rode together until the end. I lost time but it’s part of the game. After that crash, if you are all okay and continue riding then it’s super good, so I was happy that I could do that. Now I’m going to try and enjoy my rest this afternoon and get ready for tomorrow.