Henk Lategan: “The main goal is to get to the end and to get there in one piece”

Dakar 2022 | Stage 9 | HAIL > ALULA
January 11 ^th 2022 - 15:19 [GMT + 3]

The South African driver, hindered by a puncture at the beginning of the special, missed out on a second stage victory this year. In the end, it was his countryman Giniel De Villiers who won by just 9 seconds.

“I think Giniel might have taken it. We had a puncture, unfortunately, quite early on at the front left of the car so we had to stop and change that. At what kilometre did we have the puncture? – It was at about 40 km in. – Yes, at 40 km in, so we stopped to change the puncture and then we had a nice rhythm going, we were going well through the dunes. We followed Carlos, well, he actually overtook us through the dunes, so we could follow him and then we just sat in his dust all the way through to the finish. The main goal is to get to the end and to get there in one piece. It’s been a really tough and tricky Dakar. We’ve had a lot of unfortunate problems and things not really going our way, but I’ve learned an extremely big amount in a really short time, so this is all going to help us for next year if we come back. We had two really bad days. One day we lost six hours and the other day we lost three hours. Then when we stopped for Giniel, we lost about forty minutes. All in all, that’s nine hours and forty minutes that we’ve lost so far. If you take that away, we’d be going really, really nicely in the overall, but that’s part of cross-country racing – you can’t have it perfect every time. Obviously we try, but it’s not always possible”.