Loprais experienced the worst day of the rally last friday. After he suffered a puncture and bogged down in the dunes, he lost more than an hour. Saturday’s 335 km from the Chilean city of Iquique in the Atacama Desert, however, he was great, won the stage on his 35th birthday and scored the sixth stage victory on the Dakar career.
The nephew of six-time Dakar winner Karel Loprais defeated the Itatalian Bellina (Ginaf) and Dutchman Gerard de Rooy (Iveco). The superb Kamaz drivers Andrei Karginov, Dmitri Sotnikova and Ajrata Mardeev came home 4th, 5th and 6th.The sixth man of the stage Mardeev however leads by more than twenty minutes overall before Karginov, third is Sotnikov. Nikolayev, long time overall leader, lost over an hour yesterday. Second best Czech rider was in the stage was Martin Kolomý with Tatra in ninth place; he is 9th overall as well.
Loprais comments on the 7th stage:
The sixth stage was black and the seventh one gold now! We started from eleventh place by using a “joker”, who put us right at the start right behind the first 10 teams from the previous day. Everything went well for us and luckily we not met problems from yesterday, after which we are really sorry looking at the result list, but we still keep fighting. First stage victory on this year´s DAKAR at the day of my birthday, made us of course really happy. We have to concentrate for tomorrow, because today we are here at bivouac alone without service team, so we have to make service and small repairs by ourselves. Today we are not able to make a video for you, but if our team will do some one anyway that without us. Here at marathon bivouac teams don´t have any signal for mobile phones, we just can use satellite phone and connection due to overload often collapses. We hope to ensure more information’s for you during tomorrow after finishing the stage and during the day off which is following after.
Eight stage is without connecting part, trucks are going straight to special stage 271 km long. It should be again challenging, full of dunes and sand. Keep your fingers crossed for us and please support us.
Thank you.