Dakar Touched the Altitude of Five Thousand Metres
15.1.2015
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The Dakar Rally is heading to its finish, yet the racers have experienced the feelings of mountaineers climbing the Everest. The tenth stage of the famous distance race led the crews from Chile back to Argentina. Technology got as far as five thousand metres above the sea level. Saturday‘ finish is already very close and no one wants to make a mistake. The pilots are more careful and also the differences in the timed stages have been shorter. The town of Salta, final destination of stage ten, witnessed a great finish performance by Martin van den Brink, who is taming a truck built in our workshop. Dandy arrived on thirteenth place.
„I guess I’ll never forget this stage. The extreme altitude has really made us touch bottom. You can’t breathe properly and lack of oxygen gives you headache. This asks for an alpine training, which you can hardly get in the Polabí lowland. Actually, base camps on Everest start at this altitude. For us it’s a one-shot activity that only lasts a little while. The bigger the effect on our bodies though,“ told us our crew mechanic Daniel Kozlovský, adding that the team member tried to overcome the altitude difference on the way between bivouacs with aspirin and effort to sleep everything away – or at least as much as the racing crews could afford.
Stage ten was truly an extreme one. Both people and technology suffered and the reason for this was clear, the above mentioned altitude and climatic conditions. The stage from Calama to Salta stretched over almost nine hundred kilometres, whilst three hundred and sixty included the timed stage for trucks. The special started in Salinas Grandes at the height of 3,600 metres above sea level and temperature -1°C. Right after that the racing trucks reached the level of four and half thousand metres above sea level. “During the entire stage we basically didn’t descend below three and a half thousand metres. It was a bit of a fight for us. In the end of the day, we’re new to developing of technology for the Dakar but we can be very happy with what we managed in the two past years,“ smiled the team‘ chief constructor Mario Kress.
That Mario was right confirmed also the pilot Martin van den Brink, who reached seventh fastest time in the timed stage. The Dutch pilot of the Mammoet Rallysport team is driving a brand new special constructed in our technology centre. He lost thirteen minutes on the winning Russian Nikolaev. Daniel Kozlovský, our crew mechanic on board the Artur Ardavichus’s turquoise Tatra Jamal finished the stage on thirteenth position, twenty minutes after the winner. Van den Brink’s colleague de Baar steered his Renault to the finish on seventeenth place. His mate from the alliance Tomáš Vrátný arrived two positions later and third of the Bonver project, Poland’s Szustkowski, was classified on position twenty-eight.
The Dakar is still led by the Russian Mardeev, while the fastest member of the international Czech-Dutch alliance is Tomáš Vrátný on fourteenth place.
There are three more stages to go before the most extreme rally on the Globe ends. Thursday’s eleventh test will take the trucks from Salta to Termas Rio Hondo and measures five hundred and twenty kilometres. We can expect that the two-hundred-kilometre special will be one of the fastest.
Results - Trucks – stage 10: 1. Nikolaev (RUS) Kamaz 4:18:17, 2. Mardeev (RUS) Kamaz +49s, 3. Viazovich (BLR) MAZ +1:19, 4. Loprais (CZE) MAN +4:42, 5. De Rooy (NED) Iveco +5:19, 7. van den Brink (NED) Renault +13:40, 13. Ardavichus/Kozlovský (KAZ/CZE) Tatra +20:43, 17. de Baar (NED) Renault Trucks +25:23, 19. Vrátný (CZE) Tatra +30:00, 25. Kolomý (CZE) Tatra +43:19, 28. Szustkowski (POL) Tatra +51:30.
Overall ranking: 1. Mardeev (RUS) Kamaz 36:11:56, 2. Nikolaev (RUS) Kamaz +13:21, 3. Karginov (RUS) Kamaz +42:46, 4. Loprais (CZE) MAN +1:22:10, 5. Sotnikov (RUS) Kamaz +2:19:04, 7. Kolomý (CZE) Tatra +4:05:08, 14. Vrátný (CZE) Tatra +9:14:50, 16. van den Brink (NED) Renault Trucks +9:47:21, 18. Szustkowski (POL) Tatra +11:51:24, 22. Ardavichus/Kozlovský (KAZ/CZE) Tatra +16:36:56, 31. de Baar (NED) Renault Trucks +27:41:17.
