Dakar 2021 - Cars - Winners & everyone else!

 

The lost generation...

Yawn.. Stephane Peterhansel perhaps never gets bored of competing & winning Dakar so he did just that, this year too. Okay, back to serious news now. Nasser Al-Attiyah tried really hard in his Toyota to stop this Frenchman, but he seems like he was simply unstoppable and won by a decent margin of nearly 14 minutes. After competing Dakar in more than half its share of running years, it is obvious that after the organisers perhaps it is Stephane who knows and understands Dakar really well. Carlos Sainz, also famously called 'El-Matador' isn't getting any old and he took the third spot, with margin of just over an hour to his team-mate Peterhansel in their respective Mini.

Loeb down the dune

Sebastien Loeb along with Nani Roma took behind the wheels of Bahrain Raid Xtreme team's custom 'Hunter' cars prepped by Prodrive, however the 9 time WRC champ was forced to quit after he sacrificed his tyres to support his team-mate who was in better chance of winning the rally. It so happened in the second half of the rally when their support truck got stuck in the stage and lost it's 4x4 ability and was unable to deliver necessary support to both the competing cars.

The eighth stage of the Dakar Rally 2021, was the second part of the marathon stage of this year’s event, with drivers travelling the709km from Sakaka to Neom. The unique feature of marathon stages; split over two stages on consecutive days, is that drivers do not have the full extent of the Bahrain Raid Xtreme support team, just the support truck that follows the same timed route as the drivers. Drivers are responsible for any maintenance and repairs in between stages.

During stage eight, Bahrain Raid Xtreme driver, Sebastien Loeb, and co-driver Daniel Elena suffered two punctures to the #305 Hunter. Without the necessary number of spare tyres to be able to continue, was forced to retire from the stage, and subsequently this year’s Dakar Rally.

This was one among many such who had some issues or the other and were either forced to quit or simply too broken to continue.

Here is the top 10 finisher's score card.

Pos	Bib	Crew	Brand	Time	Gap	Penalty
1	302	S. PETERHANSEL	MINI	44:28:11	00:00:00	00:01:00
2	301	N. AL-ATTIYAH	TOYOTA	44:42:02	00:13:51	00:00:00
3	300	C. SAINZ	MINI	45:29:08	01:00:57	00:00:00
4	307	J. PRZYGONSKI	TOYOTA	47:03:14	02:35:03	00:02:00
5	311	N. ROMA	PRODRIVE	47:49:59	03:21:48	00:00:00
6	317	V. VASILYEV	MINI	47:57:49	03:29:38	00:01:00
7	310	SK. AL QASSIMI	PEUGEOT	48:01:42	03:33:31	00:05:00
8	304	G. DE VILLIERS	TOYOTA	48:25:50	03:57:39	00:21:00
9	312	M. PROKOP	FORD	48:37:32	04:09:21	00:01:00
10	314	C. DESPRES	PEUGEOT	49:19:20	04:51:09	00:51:00