Adventures and misadventures

Dakar 2020 | Stage 7 | Riyadh > Wadi Al Dawasir
January 13 ^th 2020 - 07:43 [GMT + 3]

Although Arkadiusz Lindner was the last quad rider to exit the special and is languishing at the bottom of the general classification, his face lights up with enthusiasm and warmth as soon as someone asks to hear the tale of his (mis-)adventures.

After spending the rest day hard at work on his machine, the Pole was hoping for an uneventful start to the second week of the rally… "I've been amassing a nice collection of setbacks since we set off from Jeddah", blurts out Arkadiusz. "The on-board computer is buggy, so I have to constantly reset it. There are also vibrations causing trouble all over the place… I thought I'd fixed all this when I changed a few pieces in Riyadh, but it obviously wasn't enough." Yesterday morning, as he rode towards Wadi Al Dawasir, the Can-Am man first ran out of petrol two kilometres before the first refuelling station. He explains: "I had to go and get some petrol on foot to be able to continue. A few kilometres further down the road, it was his transmission belt's turn to walk out on him. "You can usually change it in fifteen minutes, but it took me three times as long because the plastic guards were damaged and I had trouble taking them apart." Then, engine vibrations crippled his cable bundle, wrought havoc on his fan and caused his engine to overheat. "I was lucky enough to get some water bottles to pour into the radiation. More time lost… A helicopter approached me several times to ask whether I was ready to give up. Not in a million years! Even though this stage was no fun, with rather boring straights, my only goal is to make it to the finish. At the end of the day, I'm chuffed to have overcome all these setbacks.