Sebastien Loeb said: “We had great speed today, genuine speed. In fact we were sure we up on the time after such a good run with the car. We started first and no one overtook us, but that stage was really rough, with a lot of camel grass meaning we took some big hits.
“If you are the first car opening the stage you still have to find the line. It’s very different to follow bike tracks over car tracks. Indeed towards the end of the stage I reckoned there were only 30 bikes in front of me.
“Then after a crest on a broken dune we had our moment as on the left there was a strange ‘hole’ and we hit that on the way up and it tipped us on our side. It was only 20 kms from the end, so it would’ve been good to have got that hat-trick (of stage wins) for the Prodrive Hunter.”
