It’s all change as Joan Barreda posted the fastest time on the second day of the Dakar Rally, and Sam Sunderland takes the Dakar 2022 lead after Stage 2.
Barreda took the stage win with a time of 3 hours, 31 minutes and 20 seconds, with the Spanish Monster Energy Honda rider finishing ahead of Sam Sunderland and Kevin Benavides. But it means the British GASGAS Factory rider now moves into the overall lead of the event from Frenchmen Adrien Van Beveren, and team-mate Daniel Sanders, who led at the end of the first day.
Sunderland elected to start in sixth place for the stage and was able to catch the leading group before coming home in second on his GASGAS RC 450F Rally. A group of roud riders crossed the line five minutes behind Barreda, with Sunderland, Benavides, Howes and Price all arriving together.
Sam Sunderland: “It was an interesting day today and it certainly went a bit more smoothly than yesterday, which is what I wanted. I started sixth and focused on just pushing hard to catch the leaders. There was some tricky navigation, but I figured out the way pretty quickly and caught up to Van Beveren. We then caught up with a few more of the leading guys so from there onwards we took it in turns to navigate and it was a pretty cool way to end the stage.”
Sanders slipped to third overallafter finishing the stage in 23rd due to a small but costly navigational error which saw him on the wrong side of a canyon. But the Australian elected to jump it to recover and minimise the lost time.
Daniel Sanders: “Today was pretty wild to begin with as it was pretty cloudy and the stage was super-fast early on. I had a good day going until after a fuel stop where I went down the wrong side of a canyon and lost a little bit of time. In the end I had to jump over it to get out of it but once back on the right line I pushed on to the finish. A little frustrating but I was able to make up some time in the dunes so all in all, not a bad day really.”
Unfortunately Danilo Petrucci is officially out of the 2022 Dakar, after the Italian made an impressive debut on Day one. After suffering mechanical problems, he was unable to repair his KTM whilst running inside the top five. While he’s now ruled out of the results, race regulations do allow him to potentially continue as a learning experience but it depends whether his KTM can be fixed this evening.
Overall:
- Sam Sunderland 8:31.29
- Adrien Van Beveren 8:34.20
- Daniel Sanders 8:34.58
- Matthias Walkner 8:35.37
- Skyler Howes 8:41.28
Along with Sunderland, the other British riders are David McBride, now in 52nd overall, and David Mabbs, who has moved up to 104th from the 133 riders classified after the stage. Mirjam Pol continues to head the Women’s Trophy, Mason Klein has a 30 minute lead in the Junior classification, and Mikael Despontin takes a slim lead in the Veterans Trophy from Philippe Gendron and McBride
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