Huzink finished in emergency mode

10.1.2022

Ups and downs. Dakar is like that. One day you thrive, the next day a cold shower comes. This is exactly how Gert Huzink's crew of the North Bohemian truck must have felt. While they were having a great time yesterday, today the crew finished the 8th stage on Monday due to a broken sensor outside top 10 in emergency mode.

Monday's stage of 830 kilometers was the longest day of this year. The measured section from Al Dawadimi to Wadi Ad Dawasir was almost four hundred kilometers. It was a typical Dakar day - a difficult stage with high dunes. “We drove the opening fast passage with the first high dunes quite well. Some of the others we had to give more than one attempt and I didn't feel so good about it, but it turned out that we didn't lose that much again. Then I noticed a flat tire sidewall, so we had to change it, and a moment later I noticed that the water temperature was rising," said pilot Gert Huzink, who was still in the top ten, but a problem with the cooling system slowed him down. "We stopped, refilled some water and checked everything, but when we didn't find anything, we kept going, but the temperature was still rising to one hundred and thirty degrees, so we stopped again and checked everything. The problem was probably with the sensor. The engine went into emergency mode and we drove to the finish line at 40% power. It was not a happy day for us," Gert Huzink, pilot of the hybrid special, was disappointed and was classified in seventeenth position with a loss of an hour and a quarter to the winner Sotnikov.

Pascal de Baar, his colleague, coped with the challenging stage three positions better. "Today was the day you've been looking forward to all year. Great dunes, difficult climbs, beautiful rock formations, simply beautiful at first sight, but somehow it didn't go as planned," admitted the fourteenth de Baar.

With the stage victory, Sotnikov and his Kamaz extended his overall lead. Gert Huzink is fourteenth and Pascal de Baar eighteenth.

On Tuesday, the crews will have a nearly 500-kilometer loop around Wadi Ad-Dawasir. However, the timed section of almost two hundred and ninety kilometers will need a different approach. The program includes mountains that wind around deep canyons. And even if there is less sand, the stage will be very difficult not only due to navigation.