Jan 14th, 2014 Dakar Rally Stage 9 Race Info & Discussion

Join in and discuss all the action from Stage 9 of the 2014 Dakar Rally. After starting 56th, Robby Gordon had a great stage 8 and finished 10th. Gordon is now 24th overall. Robby Gordon will begin stage 9 at TBA

 

2014 Stage 8 Photos


STAGE 9 TRACKING


STAGE 9: CALAMA > IQUIQUE

Connection 29km | Special Stage 422km | Total 451km

 

COURSE OVERVIEW

The 2014 Dakar will reach its most northern point in Iquique, where the competitors will see the ocean for the first time this year. Above all, the drivers and teams will discover the Atacama Dunes again after a first part of a special stage which will be rather tedious. Dune specialists will be in command over a distance of almost 150km. Thrills will be guaranteed at the very end of the day, on the last three kilometres of the descent to Iquique: there is more than a 30% difference in height from start to finish and it is almost not recommended to break. The law of gravitation takes on its full meaning: the bivouac is not far away!


The GREEN section of the route is the connection , the RED is the Special Section of the stage.

 

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that'll do it ouch

well heck... scoop already off in that pic

Good job with the search,SP.

Where do you get your pic's at sandi ??

They have a great video of the downhill on Facebook. It looks like he is ready for tomorrow.

Yeah. So. This is a long race folks. Tomorrow is another day. Remember, 13 Baja 500's. Or thereabouts. Keep the Faith.

Robby really needs to find a way to get into another of these big rallys over in Europe if only to try to work out some of the kinks ahead of Dakar.

It just adds to the difficulty to take this into Dakar having never been tested in race conditions.

No argument. But, just remember, this is a brand new car. Let's see what next year brings. Think of the realities.

He needs to do one of the other Rally Raid events, to get some momentum for his team. WRC is not going to be that beneficial.

From DirtSports:

The rough nature and dunes of today’s stage favored Robby Gordon and his Gordini and he was hunting MINIs early on. Gordon was running as high as fifth place with little of the stage left and was the first non-MINI on the stage after passing Giniel De Villiers. While the crew had spent most of the night swapping the radiator to front, that move wound up costing Gordon as he reportedly damaged the radiator in the dunes and had to stop to repair it. The downtime would push him back to 28th today.

A bit of bad luck also stuck BJ Baldwin today as he ran off the road and into a ditch while trying to pass. Luckily BJ had scrubbed a lot of speed before running off so the damage was minimal, but he was still stuck for roughly 30 minutes before getting back underway. He still fared better than Gordon for the day coming in 19th for the stage and not pushing him that far back in tomorrow’s starting order.

Read more: http://www.dirtsportsnation.com/features/news/stage-9-calama-to-iqu...

Thanks for that info. But we all knew that moving the rad to the front to improve the cooling also increased the odds of damage in the case of a front end collision with sand, etc. It was a calculated risk. That is what you face with any front radiator vehicle.

Not sure if they removed the rear radiators or added a front. But I am sure he now knows what he needs to be able to run the rears in the future. This has been an expensive test of the HST, but it is surviving and will return.

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