More details about events on the first special stage of the day will be available from us later. However, we can already say, judging by the times from tracking and the data from the on-line results table, that the crew of dutchman Tonnie van Deijne is not only losing its miracle advantage from yesterday, but is even falling further behind to fourth position...

However, we must mention that according to our own split times taken from the route, Boris Gadasin was 20 seconds ahead of his dutch rival already after the first third of the route.

Boris Gadasin (driver crew #1): We drove carefully, trying to make notes of the stage. We also checked the road book as the stage was new, prepared by Mauro for this year. Now that we're confident in the road book we can drive even faster, but with this engine there's no need to push in dangerous places, for example in water, even though the first stage showed that the car didn't have any troubles with passing watersplashes at all". To listen some thoughts, expressed by Boris in English,  click here 261.00 Kb .

Tonnie van Deijne (driver crew #2): "We lost about two and a half minutes on this stage as we were first car on the road and lost the direction. Last year it was Nasser (Al Attiyah) who experienced that disadvantage, now it was my turn to face it. Gadasin drove well to finish ahead of me, his car is faster, but I do really like my new Mitsubishi, the settings and overall behavior were good, so we can improve on the next stages".

Sergey Talantsev (co-driver crew #11): "Everything was fine, and we had no problems. There was only one moment when Alexander (Mironenko - driver) reacted too fast on the note to turn to the right, so we entered the corner about one metre before the actual road and stuck in a one-metre deep ditch. The car stalled and we lost about 30-40 seconds trying to start the engine again. When we finally did it, we easily returned to the road and kept on driving. There were also some difficulties when we caught up with some slower crews in front and had to drive in their dust. On Yaroslav's (Solovyev, competing in a similar Nissan car) the steering rack broke down. But on this route there're a lot of really narrow corners where it's sometimes impossible to turn even using a handbrake. I just can't imagine how Yaroslav coped with those turns without a power steering. As for the road book, it was prepared well, and there were balises in all the necessary places".

Follow the race on-line!

Official web-site of the Baja. On-line tracking. Results on-line.