Carlos Sainz: “To finish and to win this race, I’m so happy for Audi”

Dakar 2024 | Stage 12 | YANBU > YANBU
January 19 ^th 2024 - 12:10 [GMT + 3]

By winning his 4th title on the Dakar, the first for Audi, Carlos Sainz joins Ari Vatanen in the rally winners’ roll of honour, with Al Attiyah and his 5 victories plus Peterhansel and his 8 car trophies remain ahead of him.

“It means that when you work hard and you believe in yourself, when you have a good team and good people around you, then the work will always pay off. This car is so special, it’s so difficult to manage, it has been so difficult to make it work. To finish and to win this race, well, I’m so happy for Audi. I think the energy comes from the passion I have. It’s obviously, believing in yourself, believing that you can still drive and a lot of work behind the scenes as well. To be here at my age and to stay at the level, you need to work a lot beforehand. It doesn’t just come like that. It shows that when you work hard, normally it pays off. At the moment, I want to enjoy this victory and I will think about my future in the next weeks. We will see what happens in the future. I think yesterday was an important day for the win, but it’s been important from the beginning. As I said, there were a lot of favourites but like always in the Dakar somebody is stopped by problems and from maybe tenth you can go to ninth, eighth, seventh and so on. I think we drove at a really good pace. We had a good strategy and good support from the team”.