Dakar leader fumes at organizers’ road book decision

A 20km section of stage was cut due to an error in the roadbook, at the cost of event leader Henk Lategan

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It was a decision that was always going to divide opinion.

On one side, the rally leader has seen an over-seven-minute lead almost completely evaporate; on the other there’s the contender to the throne who now has a real shot at writing history on the Dakar Rally.

It boils down to a chaotic and controversial seventh stage of the rally; more specifically a small 20km section of an over 400km loop around Al Duwadimi.

The Dakar organizers, the A.S.O. released a statement before the stage was finished detailing that a mistake had been made in the digital road book.

Many crews therefore could not find the waypoint they needed, while others did. Those who toiled searching for it lost massive amounts of time, which was subsequently handed back to them as the troublesome section was canned.

It all means that rally leader, Toyota’s Henk Lategan, lost out big time. His lead over Toyota stablemate, Overdrive Racing’s Yazeed Al Rajhi, stands at a measly 21-seconds when it had been 7m16s coming into the stage.

Having seen his lead reduced to almost nothing, Lategan felt the decision gave his rivals an ‘unfair’ advantage while failing to reward his and navigator Brett Cummings’ efforts to find the waypoint.

“I think it’s completely wrong, the way they have handled it at the moment,” Lategan told DirtFish.

“I hope it’s not official and not how they will keep it, I am totally against the way they are doing it. The way we found the waypoint, we found it first, is that we went further back than anybody, we went back to a previous instruction in the road book, and we followed the road book and that’s what got us to the point.

“Everybody else forked a little bit too far left to the wrong valley, but we went all the way back and started to follow it again and that’s what got us to the waypoint. Everybody else had the same information as us; for them [ASO] to go and say that they will cut that bit out is completely unfair.”

While Lategan felt aggrieved, there were opposing emotions within the Dacia Sandriders camp as Nasser Al-Attiyah avoided a 30-minute time drain to stay in the hunt for a podium finish.

Al-Attiyah’s navigator Edouard Boulanger had no sympathy for Lategan’s concerns.

“It’s completely fair to cancel the section and they did it already, because apart from this section everything else was correct and there is no debate,” Boulanger said.

“Starting 15th and arriving ahead of 12 other cars who were looking for the exit and ‘oh look the exit is there, easy to find the waypoint!’ Sorry Henk but that’s f****** wrong.

“If [the road book] was correct, the organizers would not have cancelled the section before the end of the stage, before we reached the finish line. That means something to me. You have your time before and you have your time after. If you’re not happy, then add more gas.”

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Boulanger doesn't accept Lategan's argument

Lategan maintained that he and Cummings had been able to find the waypoint using the original instructions in the road book and having found it before their rivals, altered their approach to the second half of the stage as effective road openers.

“Up until that point, there was no mistake, or let’s say there was nothing that caught everybody out,” said Lategan.

“The road book instructions and how you think and how you drive is not always the same thing. The cap we followed in the road book was correct, that’s what got us to the waypoint; maybe the picture wasn’t correct, but the cap [heading] was and that’s how we got there.”

“We started further back on the road this morning; we found the waypoint first and we were opening the road and we knew that our main rivals were behind us and that we could calm down a bit until they started catching us up.

“We drove a completely different race to the others, having that in mind, so there was no use taking any risk or pushing too hard. It would have changed the race completely if we knew that they were going to take this section out.”

Lategan found some support from M-Sport Ford’s Nani Roma who believed the section should not have been cut from the official times.

“It was a tough day; in some places everyone was turning,” Roma said. “Now I heard that maybe he [David Castera] will cut this part but for me it’s not fair if it is cut out.

“This is rally raid, this is part of the game; sometimes you gain, sometimes you lose. I don’t know what the FIA will decide but I hope they do not cut this part.”

Around 12 cars ended up in the same valley searching for the right path, something which Boulanger believes is proof that the mistake was large enough to have major repercussions on the stage result.

“When we didn’t find the exit of the mountain, we went back three times, four times to understand where we made the mistake because we were convinced that we made a mistake,” explained Boulanger.

“And then we were 12 cars who also made the mistake, so we understood that none of us made the mistake. And from this moment, we tried to understand how to exit this valley.

“We took a wrong cap heading into the wrong valley and suddenly 3km after that the waypoint popped up so then we recognized that we were back on track.”

It’s a debate that is likely to carry on deep into the evening, with Toyota appealing the decision to cut out the 20km section.

As it currently lies, Lategan is in a precarious position at the top of the order, while M-Sport’s Mattias Ekström is suddenly back in victory contention at just over 10 minutes off the lead.

And then there’s Al-Attiyah: following his week one dramas, very few predicted he would be in the mix for his sixth Dakar triumph, but he’s now only 22 minutes away with five stages still left to run.

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