“There is not much left for me to retire, but I don’t know when it will be”
LAS ROZAS (MADRID), Dec. 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish driver Carlos Sainz (Audi) did not want to “argue” on Tuesday with the Dakar Rally regulations for vehicles with electric motors, such as his RS Q e-tron E2, which must weigh 100 kilos more than the rest, and although he is surprised that “brands are not encouraged to go towards sustainability via regulation”, does not hide that they have a car to “fight” for a test whose “DNA is still intact” and which they want not to be “a gymkhana” in navigation .
“The car is a ‘copy-paste’ in a good way. It weighs 90 kilos less, but by regulation we will carry 100 more than the others. It is difficult to understand that we go with 2,100. Not to encourage brands to go towards that path of sustainability with certain aid surprises me,” said Sainz at the presentation of his project for the Dakar 2023, with his co-driver, Lucas Cruz.
The man from Madrid, champion of three Dakars (2010, 2018 and 2020), valued this issue on several occasions, although he insisted that he does not want to “argue with the regulations”. “It is a very technologically complex car, Audi has been very brave to put it in a race as complicated as the Dakar. It is like science fiction. It is a brutal technological challenge and that makes it special. Who was going to tell me 40 years ago years that I was going to use this technology,” he added.
“We have a car to fight for the race. I don’t consider Audi a favourite, the favorite is last year’s champion, but we can fight for the race,” said Sainz, who would bet on Audi as the winner “because it’s a great team, with three drivers and three co-drivers very capable of winning the race”. “But it’s not easy to win it, you have to build a trustworthy team,” he added.
The 60-year-old pilot was “encouraged, happy and looking forward to” this 2023 Dakar, after a last edition that he arrived at “very fair, without any race, with many questions and many doubts”. “The rally went much better than we thought. Now we have fewer doubts and are looking forward to the day,” he commented on the test, which begins on December 31.
“The tests have gone well, the car has behaved well, it is very to my liking. In the Morocco Rally, when you analyze the times, we were not the fastest, but we were already going with 30kw less, which we will have in the Dakar. I don’t think we’re bothering, but I don’t know where it’s going at the regulation level,” he said.
In addition, he addressed the famous issue with the hidden ‘waypoint’ that he could not reach in the last edition, like “90 percent” of the rest of the cars. “The hidden ‘waypoints’ are new in recent years to try to make things happen. If it is not very well chosen, being hidden, sometimes they put it on a very poorly marked track and it is impossible. It is not that we do not take it , is that it is difficult to catch them”, he explained.
“The fact that they have introduced these ‘waypoints’ does not mean that we are taking ‘little turns’. The DNA of the Dakar is still intact and this year will be very hard. I am confident that this year will be a logical navigation and we are not talking about a gymkhana”, he reflected. .
Regarding the physical preparation, the man from Madrid affirmed that for him “it is easy to understand”. “You already have experience and you know what you are going to find. I prefer to suffer here and do my homework before going there,” he pointed out.
“As you get older, preparation and motivation cost more, but you have to have discipline. It’s not a merit, it’s my obligation. If Audi trusts us, it’s because we can do things well and for that we have to be prepared,” he stressed. the two-time world rally champion, whom age still does not seem to slow down. “It’s not long before I retire, but I don’t know when it’s going to be,” he declared.
As for the rivals, Sainz confessed that the Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah “is a very nice guy, but when it comes to competing, he does whatever it takes to win.” “He has a different type of philosophy than I can have. He pokes whoever is next to him, and then his movie is put on. He is a great pilot and one of the great favorites, those things would not be necessary for him. He puts on his helmet and the pot goes a bit, that fails him,” he warned.
“For Sebastian Loeb to win the Dakar is a matter of time, but it is not something easy, otherwise a lot of people would win it. We have been fighting for many years to win,” the Spaniard said of the French pilot.
LUCAS CRUZ: “IT WILL BE A DIFFERENT DAKAR TO THE ONE WE ARE USED TO”
For his part, Carlos Sainz’s co-driver, Lucas Cruz, expects “a different race” than what they are “accustomed to”. “There is a first week in which the specials will be long, with up to 460 kilometres, where there will be no rest in the middle of the stage and where we will not know if the rhythm is good until the end”, he explained.
“In the second week, there will be the marathon stage and the specials will be long but slow, so we will have to be stable and approach them in a different way. The three or four days of sand will be key,” added the Catalan.
He celebrated that the car feels “at ease in the sand because it is more agile than the previous version and requires less braking effort”, while he considers it “incongruent and a bit illogical to put hidden points in the open desert”. “New headings and new tracks can be generated,” he said.