It was Joan Barreda, who started out first today from Antofagasta, as the winner of yesterday’s stage. After completing the 144 km liaison he set of to tackle the 605 km special against the clock, the longest to date in the Dakar 2014. The eleventh stage covered a variety of terrain, hard ground, mountains, plus 120 km of sand and dunes in the Copiapo area.
Joan Barreda fell about halfway through the special in the fesh-fesh zone, damaging the navigation system of his Honda CRF450 RALLY in the process. Without the road-book, the Spaniard was forced to wait for the other riders to be able to make it to the end of the stage. Barreda finished fifth and maintains second position in the overall.
Portuguese Hélder Rodrigues was enjoying a good run until a problem with one of the petrol tanks arose. At refuelling he made an attempt to repair the tanks, refilled, and was able to finish the rally without conceding much time to his adversaries in the battle for the third podium step.
After yesterday’s eighth place, Javier Pizzolito finished further back after he hit a rock and damaged the bike’s rear wheel suspension.
Laia Sanz, made a decided effort to improve on her previous position, after a less positive day out yesterday. Today the Spanish rider never dropped below fifteenth place where she finally finished. Her team-mate from the Honda Argentina Rally Team, Pablo Gonzalez finished the special in the top forty.
Joan Barreda: Today was one of the most important days with a lot of timed kilometres. I really tried, pushing hard from the beginning, but about 300 km into the race I had a heavy fall in the fesh-fesh zone and I broke the navigation system. I waited for Cyril [Despres] who was about six minutes behind and I stuck with him until the end of the special. I’m happy that we’ve got this difficult stage out of the way and we are a bit closer to the end.
