RALLY DAKAR 2022

Benediktas Vanagas hiela la sangre del Dakar con un salvaje accidente

Talent, speed and experience to set the pace at every moment of the race. These are the three qualities that come together in the great referents of Dakar, albeit in different proportions. Nasser Al-Attiyah, Carlos Sainz, Sébastien Loeb or Stéphane Peterhansel may be the pilots who have achieved a better balance between speed, talent and experience to measure when to attack and when to lift the pie. Perhaps this last point is what differentiates them from the rest, and pilots such as Yazeed Al-Rajhi or Benediktas Vanagas have shown great explosion and rhythm, only accompanied by irregularity and a riding that touches the limits.

To show the accident that Benediktas Vanagas and his co-driver Filipe Palmeiro have had on the fourth stage of Dakar, without doubting the loss but the safety and spectacular of the rally. If there has been a lot of riders who have succumbed to the bachelor's degrees and shifts that existed in some of the sections of the longest stage in Dakar, at a glance it seems that Vanagas has paid his excess speed with a spectacular impact against it. Your Toyota Hilux V8 has catapulted it to three pitches. As a result, both Benediktas and Filipe were unharmed.

In sporting terms, Benediktas Vanagas has seen that his options for making a 'top 10' in Dakar have evaporated, a goal that was, in short, tenor of the problems that some of the great names of the rally have had, such as Carlos Sainz, Stéphane Peterhansel the Nani Roma. While the Lithuanian started with a discreet rhythm in the prologue and in the first stage of the rally, Benediktas managed to achieve the tenth stage in the second stage, a position he also moved to occupy in the general. With this place in the classification it also closes the third stage, only Vanagas takes a step forward until finishing fifteenth in the special by ayer.

For Benediktas, this accident ends the upward trend that he had maintained in Dakar in recent years. After five appearances in the rally, Vanagas finished in the Dakar 2019 edition, in which he was only five seconds away from occupying the last place in the 'top 10'. A year later, the Lithuanian pilot confirmed that this performance had not been the flower of an edition and he finished fifteenth in the general. Last year he was twelfth, leaving him with several spurts of his speed, something he has not been able to do this year, despite the support of Toyota Gazoo Racing and Overdrive.

Autonews/Mundoquatrorodas