Qatar’s Nasser Saleh Al Attiyah in action during the Rally of Morocco yesterday.
FES, MOROCCO: Qatar’s Nasser Saleh Al Attiyah stayed clear of problems through the final stage to claim his fifth successive victory in the gruelling Rally of Morocco and give Overdrive Racing and the Toyota Gazoo Racing South Africa Team a major boost as preparations continue for the 2019 Dakar Rally.
A demanding six-day event that ran with a new organising team under the leadership of former Dakar organiser and navigator David Castera featured 1,362 kilometres of tricky navigation, dunes, rocky terrain, river bed crossings and everything that the team needed to shake down its fleet of Toyota Hiluxes before January’s Peruvian challenge. The success marked a hat-trick of wins for Al-Attiyah with the Toyota.
Al Attiyah and his French navigator Matthieu Baumel dominated the race from the start and overcame their fair share of minor problems and delays to earn a winning margin of 16min 41sec over the newly-crowned FIA World Cup champion Jakub Przygonski and his Belgian navigator Tom Colsoul.
Al Attiyah said: “It’s unbelievable that we’ve been able to win our fifth consecutive Rally of Morocco. I’m so happy with our performance here and our new car has been really strong all week.”
The French crew of Ronan Chabot and Gilles Pillot produced one of their best ever performances to seal an impressive fifth overall in the second of the Overdrive Racing Toyotas.
It was an action-packed event for South Africa’s Giniel de Villiers and Dutchman Bernhard Ten Brinke in the second and third Toyota Gazoo Racing South Africa cars. De Villiers broke a wishbone and suffered exhaust issues that ultimately cost him additional time penalties and pushed him and French navigator Alexandre Winocq down the order.
Ten Brinke teamed up with Frenchman Xavier Panseri for the first time and started strongly. Small navigational errors and a light roll hampered their progress and the Dutchman reached the finish in Fes in sixth place after passing Jean-Pascal Besson on the last stage.
The Dutch crew of Erik van Loon and new co-driver Harmen Scholtabers were running strongly inside the top 10 until they suffered a heavy impact on the fourth stage that damaged the car’s differential and the resultant time penalties incurred for reaching the bivouac by road dropped Van Loon down at the finish. Russian G-Energy driver Vladimir Vasilyev and navigator Konstantin Zhiltsov lost their slim chance of overhauling Przygonski to snatch a second FIA World Cup title when transmission issues sidelined their Toyota.
Al Attiyah clocked the quickest time of 8min 27sec through the opening 10km Prologue stage at Fes. The Qatari beat Martin Prokop by nine seconds and Jakub Przygonski by 23.
Ovedrive Racing colleagues De Villiers, Vasilyev, Ten Brinke, Van Loon and Chabot were fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth and 14th. Seaidan lost 13 minutes on the Prologue and stopped the clocks in 21min 04sec after rolling his Toyota and Domzala also suffered a minor technical issue.
