Giniel de Villiers: “Thanks to the mechanics for last night for their hard work”

Dakar 2022 | Stage 9 | HAIL > ALULA
January 11 th 2022 - 14:08 [GMT + 3]

Today witnessed the first stage win of the year for Giniel de Villers who had not yet even climbed onto a stage podium on this edition of the rally.

Giniel de Villiers_Stage 9_ENG
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“It looks good. We had a nice clean stage today. I must say that the mechanics worked really, really hard last night because we had a problem with the dampers over the last two days or so. But they did a great job and the car was just unbelievable today. Really nice to drive, so we could push nicely. We had one slow puncture on the front left about fifty kilometres from the end, but it managed to hold out and now we’re very happy, very happy for the team. We didn’t stop because it wasn’t necessary to stop. We’re very happy for the team and thanks to the guys for last night for their hard work. We’ve had some bad luck. Unfortunately, we had an oil pipe come off and we lost one hour, but this race is very strange. We’ve had some challenges ourselves and we will see. There are still three stages to go, so anything could still happen. So, we’ll keep on trying our best until then, for sure. I must say, the first week was not ideal. It was very stressful and mentally very, very tiring. Definitely something I would not like to go through again, but that’s behind us now. We’re looking to the future. We cannot change the past. We’re looking to the future and I’m just happy that we managed to find out what the problem was with our damper. The Hilux is really good and the BF Goodrich tyres were really nice today. I don’t know why we often win at the end. It would be nice to win at the beginning as well, but we seem to do well the longer the rally goes on, so maybe the rally needs to be three weeks! We’ll try for another win, we’ll see. Like I said, our car is really nice now and we’ll try to do our best tomorrow. Of course, we have to open the road, so it will be a little more difficult. You never know… We will try our best and see what happens”.

© R. Sabatier

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