Countless struggles for so many climbs, but second place seems to stick to Sébastien Loeb’s skin on the Dakar. And it is again in this place in the general classification, behind leader Carlos Sainz, that the French driver will set off for the last two stages of this Dakar 2024, Thursday with 420 km between Al-Ula and Yanbu, and Friday for a 175 km loop around Yanbu.
His record – 80 rally victories and nine WRC World Championship titles, a record at Pikes Peak in addition to his 27 stage victories on the Dakar – is as long as the 48-hour stage of this Dakar, the great new for 2024. Yet the French driver has never managed to win the most famous rally-raid. In seven participations, he has never ranked better than in this famous second place, three times. The fault is “small mechanical problems”, sometimes “bullshit on his part”, also “navigation errors”. “And every year I had one of the three,” recalled Loeb before the start.
This year is no exception to the rule, and after a multitude of punctures, he had to face, on Wednesday, new mechanical problems that were quite crazy at that level. Without his hydraulic jack which was not repaired, Loeb and his Belgian co-driver, Fabian Lurquin, were forced to find rocks on which to land to replace the same tire, which had suffered a puncture twice.
“Small problems that leave psychological traces”
Except that the battery of the nut gun, to quickly change the wheel, had not been recharged by his team. “We had to take out the toolbox to get the manual wrench to tighten the wheel. It sucks,” the driver even got angry at Prodrive at the end of the 10th stage on Wednesday. And it is not the seven and some minutes recovered from his opponent, Carlos Sainz, now only thirteen minutes ahead of him, that will console him.
“It’s all these little problems that leave psychological traces. When we see what happened to Nasser Al-Attiyah with the engine reliability problems, there is also reason to be concerned. I hope his engine doesn’t burn, because he at least deserves the podium,” he said. 20 minutes Luc Alphand, winner of the Dakar in 2006.
A “flamboyant attacker”, with the risks that this entails
When it’s not errors from Prodrive, or reliability problems like the resounding declarations of Nasser Al-Attiyah who simply no longer wants to “drive” the English preparer’s car, it’s still bad luck who catches up with Sébastien Loeb on the Dakar. Like these five punctures during the first three stages of this 2024 edition, which placed him almost 45 minutes from the head of the general classification.
But thanks to his driving skills, Loeb has since fought hard to make up for his deficit and achieve a comeback that was almost unimaginable just a week ago.
Ol whips, and wins stage after stage to the point of having won more than certain winners of the rally, which he has still not won. It’s also perhaps because he’s so into it. The Dakar is 14 days and 14 stages and it goes beyond just driving. You have to drive fast, but clean. Stéphane Peterhansel did not win so much just because he was going fast, but also because he knew how to preserve his car. Seb is a little less successful, he’s more of a flamboyant attacker,” says Luc Alphand.
“It can be played out on Friday,” warns Luc Alphand
The French driver will have no choice but to attack anyway, while Carlos Sainz will be more in the management. Because the Audi, although “the fastest car” on the plateau according to the former skier, also has a lot of reliability problems. “The unknown of reliability is a bit of a worm in the apple for Sainz and Audi,” says Luc Alphand. Without his teammate Mattias Ekström who came to repair a wheel after three punctures, “El Matador” could even have lost the lead in the general classification on Wednesday.
With another complicated day on the abrasive rocks of this 11th stage of 400 km of special between Al-Ula and Yanbu on Thursday, everything can still be decided between Sainz and Loeb. “And it can even still be played out on Friday, because 175 km is not nothing. I have already seen a competitor lose 20 minutes on the last day due to poor navigation,” recalls Luc Alphand. Although absent from the Dakar for the first time since 1998 due to tests on a hydrogen car, the Dakar winner and ski champion will not miss a beat of these last two stages: “That promises! “, he warns.