VW Race Touareg 2

Dakar Rally 2009 - Leg 5

Wednesday, 7th January: Neuquen > San Rafael

• Link section: 173 km
• Special stage: 506 km
• Link section: 84 km
• Total: 763 km

The leg to San Rafael represents the possibly toughest test of the first Dakar week. Due to the high mileage, the entrants have to be fully focused for a long time. Furthermore, the drivers have to cope with true dune sections, one of them featuring a distance of nearly 20 kilometres. Long off-road sections alternate with the clearly more technical ones of the ‘Rios Climbs’. The picturesque mountain range remains at the horizon but taking it easy is off-limits: arriving at the bivouac too late always leaves its marks.

At the beginning of leg five – from Neuquen to San Rafael – Al-Attiyah once again took the lead. In his BMW X3 entered by Team X-Raid, the man from Qatar quickly opened a 2:24-minute gap on South African Volkswagen Touareg driver Giniel de Villiers and his German navigator Dirk von Zitzewitz. While the previous leader, Carlos Sainz (VW Touareg), lost valuable time due to a driving mistake during the first difficult dune kilometres.

His German team-mates Dieter Depping/Timo Gottschalk (Wedemark/Berlin) who seemed to be on the way to their first Dakar-leg win for a long time, improved by one position to tenth (1:16:40 minutes behind the leader).

At the end of the day, however, the fifth Dakar leg (506km special stage) from Neuguen to San Rafael proved to be a successful one for Volkswagen, nevertheless, with Giniel de Villiers and Dieter Depping giving the German manufacturer a one-two, followed by Hummer driver Robby Gordon.

Consequently, it was a day of mixed emotions for the Wolfsburgers: on the one hand, the celebrated a one-two but on the other, they lost the lead in the Dakar overall standings to BMW.

In the meantime, just multi-time winner Peterhansel encountered a day to forget and somersaulted – just like Sainz. Fortunately, both the Frenchman and the Spaniard survived their incidents unharmed – but the Peterhansel’s Mitsubishi was damaged that seriously that it wasn’t clear if he would be able to contest the following leg to Mendoza.

The death of motorbike driver Pascal Terry cast a shadow over all these results. The 49-year old Yamaha driver had been missed by the Dakar organisers since Sunday, after the second leg from Santa Rosa de la Pampa to Puerto Madryn.

According to Argentinean media reports, mishaps and misunderstandings resulted in the fact that it took 48 hours to find Terry. Now, the emergency forces found the 49-year old on an almost impassable section of the course, some 300 metres off track, under a tree. Terry, who contested the Dakar for the first time on two wheels, lay in the shadow, several metres away from his bike and with his helmet taken off. The circumstances of his death weren’t clear, at this point in time. Later, the following announcement was made: French motorbike driver Pascal Terry passed away during the Dakar Rally due to a pulmonary oedema.

Leg 6 »