The car champion gave up hope of defending the title on the first day

The most extreme car race on the planet Dakar Rally has just started in 2022, and there have been a series of incidents, fortunately no one has died.

The car champion gave up hope of defending the title on the first day

Champion Stephane Peterhansel’s hope of defending the auto championship at Dakar Rally 2022 at the 2022 Dakar Rally was extinguished on the first day of the competition on January 1, because the French driver’s electric Audi suffered a rear axle failure in the first leg of the race. the Saudi desert, which took him more than 5 hours.

Stephane Peterhansel started quite well in 2nd place, but the Audi driver crashed around the 153km mark on the 333km Ha’il circuit.

In this category, Toyota’s Qatari driver Nasser Al-Attiyah finished first after 3 hours 30 minutes 53 seconds, temporarily leading with a difference of 12 minutes 44 seconds ahead of 2nd place opponent, French driver Sébastien Loeb of BRX each 9 times. won the World Rally Championship.

Al Attiyah thanked co-driver Matthieu Baumel for keeping him on track on the rocky and sandy road.

Al Attiyah explains: ” The race is really not easy… Mathieu does a great job navigating. We saw a lot of runs that veered off to the right, but Mathieu said ‘no, you need to be on the left’ ” .

Having won the Dakar Rally 3 times, but Carlos Sainz – Peterhansel’s teammate at Audi – Al Attiyah later arrived for more than 2 hours due to being lost in the desert.

It seems Audi has a hard time hitting its target of being the first manufacturer to win at Dakar with an electric powertrain. However, the Audi RS Q e-tron also has a gasoline engine to charge the car’s battery during a road race that lasts about 2 weeks.

In the motorcycle category , Australia’s Daniel Sanders led the way for the GasGas team on day 1, having won over Chilean rival Pablo Quintanilla by more than three minutes.

The second day of competition took place on Monday, January 3, 2022 with a length of 338km following a chain of sand dunes on the way to Al-Artawiya.

In the auto category , Sebastien Loeb shortened the gap with Nasser Al Attiyah to just over 9 minutes, after the 47-year-old French driver finished 3 minutes 28 seconds earlier.

Carlos Sainz and “Mr Dakar” Stephane Peterhansel finished 3rd and 4th respectively. The now sure-to-be former champion says his real goal now is to test the car for racing next year!

In the motorcycle category , British driver Sam Sunderland took the first place from Daniel Sanders, because the Australian driver lost his way, he only finished 23rd, popping out of the Top 3 provisional rankings. The winner of this second stage is the Spaniard Joan Barreda of Honda.

Former MotoGP racer Danilo Petrucci had to ask for help from an airplane on his first visit to Dakar and soon ended the race due to a broken KTM engine that he could not fix forever.

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc is a racer who has suffered the consequences of his decision to change a tire late . Starting from the penultimate position, the Ferrari driver still reached the top with points when he placed 9th and was two places behind Verstappen in the final stages, and quickly rose to fourth when the rain turned everything upside down. But the late return to the pit at the same time as Norris made him drop to 15th and no score.

Meanwhile, the decision to stop for a new tire in the middle of the race on lap 26 took a toll on Verstappen. This choice puts the Dutch driver in the middle of the slow car group and far behind the upper group. And things took a turn for the worse when he was overtaken by Alonso. Alonso also switched to hard tires at the same time as Verstappen, but stopped 10 laps later to change to new tires and soon overtook the juniors.

But in the end, the rain came to Verstappen’s rescue. The Dutchman made the command to pit to the intermediate tire at the right time and came in second, in a move that could be considered crucial in a tight title race against Hamilton. After the race, although the rain helped Hamilton win, in the end he was still only two points ahead of Verstappen, while if it didn’t rain, the gap would be at least 6 points.