Dakar 2021 Stage 6: Rodrigues Bags Top Ten Finish For Hero MotoSports While Noah Continues Upwards Trajectory

Dakar Rally 2021 reached its halfway point with the conclusion of stage six. Infact the stage was actually shortened by 100km and the start delayed by 1 hour and 30 minutes due to a significant number of competitors facing difficulties in finishing the previous stage. Despite that, this stage saw a couple of close fights as well as a strong run of results from the Indian presence at the rally. Here’s how everything panned out in the end.

After a relatively low-key stage five, Hero MotoSports had a strong stage six in the bikes category.  Joaquim Rodrigues led the charge with an 8th place finish while Sebastian Buhler finished 21st in the end. Harith Noah continued his upwards trajectory by finishing 29th in the end. This result bumps up Rodrigues to 17th in the overall standings, with Buhler in 21st. Harith Noah also jumped up a few places to rank 36th as the only Indian rider remaining in the rally.

 

Carlos Sainz (X-Raid Mini JCW) secured a dominant second stage win of the rally in the cars category. He finished over four minutes ahead of Yazeed Al Rajhi (Overdrive Toyota) with Toyota’s Nasser Al-Attiyah rounding off the top three. Despite this win, Sainz lies third overall and still has a lot of ground to make up in order to overhaul Nasser Al-Attiyah as well as overall leader and teammate Stephane Peterhansel.

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Another closely contested stage for the bikes category saw Joan Barreda (Monster Energy Honda) take his third stage win of the event by only 13 seconds over Ross Branch (Yamaha). Daniel Sanders (KTM) followed the pair home in third place. The overall leaderboard changed hands once again as Toby Price (Red Bull KTM) took back the overall lead with Kevin Benavides (Monster Energy Honda) second and teammate Jose Ignacio Cornejo in third place.

It was a clean sweep by Kamaz in the trucks category as Airat Mardeev, Dmitry Sotnikov and Anton Shibalov and made it a Kamaz 1-2-3 for the team. Dmitry Sotnikov extended his lead in the overall standings over teammates Anton Shibalov and Airat Mardeev.

The Dakar crew will now have a rest stop at Ha’il, with stage seven commencing on January 10. The stage will cover 737km from Ha'il to Sakaka out of which 431km will be the special stage.