Mystery of the 13th point

The second stage of the 2013 Dakar was announced by the race organizers as a real "fighting" stage, especially as the place, where the competitors of the race were after Lima, quite disposed to serious marathon fight. The 242-kilometer special stage in a lifeless desert was full of sand surfaces and high dunes. To the estimated time journalists left the camp to the finish line, which was directly in front of bivouac. Today’s start was mixed - cars and trucks started together according to results of a yesterday's stage. MINI of Stephane Peterhansel was the first at the finish line, after him there were other leaders in auto category. Finally the truck of Gerard de Rooy appeared. The information that he goes first was already on the first checkpoint. By the way, today's victory of this Dutchman at the stage is twentieth in his career at Dakar. For the another competitor of De Rooy team Hans Stacey the day was not entirely successful, on one of the dunes his car laid on its side, Mickey Biasion with the help of lanyards quickly put it on the wheels.

Minutes, before the Eduard Nikolaev’s truck appeared at the finish line, seemed to be eternity for expecting him Russian journalists and photographers. We go back to the bivouac, to understand details of today. While we were waiting for the guys the winner of 2011 Dakar Nasser Al-Attiyah came to the KAMAZ-master bivouac for interview. Qatari looked a little worried. According to him his team's crew had problems with the capture of the navigation point. He lost about 17 minutes on it, his teammate, Spaniard Carlos Sainz - about 22 minutes. Al-Attiyah is sure that there was a failure in navigation providing.

The KAMAZ-master crews confirmed that they had similar problems on the 13th point of the legend. Road-book did not lead crews to the actual point GPS. "A lot of crews turned at this point," - said Eduard Nikolaev. Team leader Vladimir Chagin, after a brief meeting with the co-pilots decided to inform sports commissioners about these problems. Some other teams participating in Dakar did the same.

Unfortunately, there were some technical problems: at Andrey Karginov's car the clutch got out of order. And it happened almost at the beginning of the special stage. The Andrey Karginov's crew and Ilgizar Mardeev’s crew which came to the rescue him lost nearly an hour trying to continue the movement.

"Finally we managed to start, gear began to work, but we had constantly to throttle back and it disturbed too much when we were overcoming the dunes." Andrey nevertheless managed to reach to the finish line, although it is a big question. Let's consider it as a small victory of today.

Summing up the results of today, Kamaz-master team leader Vladimir Chagin said: "I understand that our fans and we aren't pleased by our results, but one thing can calm us - our pilots are able to go at a leaders pace of truck classification. Yes, at the beginning we were behind because of navigation, but then to the finish line, this gap didn’t increase. Dakar just began. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow competitors have to overcome two difficult stages in the dunes. Our guys will fight."