Henk Lategan: “For that little bolt to put us out of contention is ridiculous”

Dakar 2026 | Stage 11 | BISHA > AL HENAKIYAH
January 15 ^th 2026 - 18:56 [GMT + 3]

Henk Lategan seems to be definitively out of the running this time, finishing more than four hours after the winner on today's special. The South African kept his cool and his smile at the finishing line but he did not hide his frustration at the bad luck that seems to have dogged him since Yanbu.

“This is the end of our Dakar. Everything that could be thrown at us was thrown at us. Every day we’d get back up and carry on going and keep pushing, but this Dakar has tried really hard to get us down and I think finally it has managed. We lost four hours on the stage. It was a little bolt that broke on the wheel and cost us four hours. It’s a very strange one. We’ve never broken something like this. It’s designed not to break there. We carry a lot of other spare parts on the car because if this bolt goes then the whole wheel bearing falls apart and that’s what happened. This is not supposed to break. There are other things, like the rear trailing arm, the control arm, the ball joints, they’re all designed to break before these sorts of things break. They’re put in places, call it a fuse, so that when you break something like that you can quickly change it. We carry a lot of spares on the car for that reason. If anything else around it broke we would have lost maybe five minutes and then we’d be going again but not that bolt. I don’t know what else to do but smile, it’s unbelievable. We kept going and we kept fighting. We were always coming from the back and getting back up there. We were pushing for so many days and just trying so hard for so many days. For that little bolt to put us out of contention is ridiculous. We will start really far back tomorrow, I guess, but let’s see. We will push again. It’s the only thing left to do, it’s the only thing we know how to do”.