The Atacama Rally has again highlighted Team HRC and Paulo Gonçalves’ knack of consistently turning out high-level performances and triumphs in a season about to culminate with the OiLibya Morocco Rally, last stop before the Dakar 2016.
Team HRC dispatched the duo Paulo Goncalves and Jeremías Israel to head the campaign – the fifth round of the FIM Cross-Country Rallies World Championship staged in Chile.
Paulo Goncalves once again shone in a highly technical Atacama Rally. The Portuguese rider set out his stall early at the event’s curtain-raiser by grabbing top prize in the short prologue. Although an electrical breakdown the following day, on the rally’s first full stage, needed an hour to repair and effectively ended Team HRC’s chance of an overall win, it did little to diminish Goncalves’ hunger for victory. The rider went on to win the second and fifth stages too. Goncalves’ break-neck pace and navigational dexterity saw him rise from fifteenth place overall after the first stage to a final sixth position.
Paulo Goncalves, with 53 points, now sits in fifth spot in the world championship standings. With just the Morocco Rally still to go, the Honda CRF450 RALLY can still climb various places on the leaderboard. Even a shot at the title isn’t completely ruled out either.
For Jeremías Israel the Atacama Rally meant a return from a serious operation, carried out to remove a plate in his right arm that had been fitted after a bad fall in the Dakar 2014 and had caused considerable pain in the Qatar Sealine. ‘Jere’ was on a three-fold mission: to get back into the race rhythm, get used to the speed and clock up some serious mileage on the Honda CRF450 RALLY. The Chilean put his final eighth place down to a lack of action and sanctions for having missed some waypoints.
Team HRC will be back in competition in the first week of October at the OiLibya Morocco Rally, the sixth and final date whose points count towards the FIM Cross-Country Rallies World Championship. The race gets underway in Zagora October 3rd and finishes on the 9th in Agadir.
Martino Bianchi: For Team HRC, the Atacama Rally didn’t go as we had expected. The mechanical problems that Paulo Goncalves experienced at the beginning meant that we were unable to battle for the winning spot. But some positive signs did come out of this Atacama Rally. First of all, we saw that Paulo Gonçalves is in very good shape and he proved that he has very good navigational skills, a lot of pace and is in great physical shape too. He would have won the race, if it hadn’t been for losing an hour in the first stage. One other important thing has been that we were able to check on Jeremias Israel’s condition after the surgery on his arm. It was important to have raced here as we clearly see that he needs more work on every level in order to improve his performance in the future. Now, we have four very important months in order to analyse and prepare for the Dakar with a couple of weeks of intensive tests in Spain and in Morocco. Of course, the Morocco Rally will be the final test with the whole team together before the Dakar.
