Frustrated Peterhansel explains costly Dakar accident

Peterhansel, a 13-time Dakar champion, had emerged as a runaway leader after an attrition-heavy opening leg of the event in Peru.

He looked set to extend his lead further during Saturday's La Paz – Uyuni stage, but damaged his left-rear suspension and spent over an hour and a half at a standstill.

Peterhansel said this incident was nowhere near as galling as his biggest Dakar heartbreak – the mechanical failure that robbed him of a first car-class win in 2003 – but conceded it was still a major disappointment.

“The worst was when I had not yet won in cars, and I was leading from the first day until the penultimate day and everything went wrong,” he recalled. “The first victory in cars had slipped through my hands and that was hard.

“But here it just pisses me off. It makes me mad for the Peugeot team, for Jean-Paul [Cottret, co-driver], and for myself.

“It won’t change much in the end for my career. I don’t have regrets, we were going fast and I never saw what we hit, I don’t even know if it was a rock, or a piece of wood. We were probably going too fast.”

Peterhansel said the incident had left his Peugeot with damage so extensive that he had to “cannibalise” the 3008DKR Maxi of teammate Cyril Despres, who is playing a support role after he had lost insurmountable amounts of time earlier in the rally.

Recalling the crash, Peterhansel said: “There was a big water puddle and a quad that had stopped, for some reason, so I moved over and then I heard a huge bang, of an incredibly violent nature.

“We tore apart all of the rear assembly: suspension, transmission, shocks, we destroyed everything.

“We started to take things apart and we waited for Cyril and unfortunately he had a few problems in the first few km so he took longer to arrive but then we cannibalised his car.

“We took the two shocks, two suspensions, two brakes. He did an amazing job. We helped him take parts off his car. Ours was ready to receive the parts.”

Peterhansel completed the stage at a competitive pace despite the car being “not 100 percent” and now sits third overall, trailing rally leader and teammate Carlos Sainz by an hour and 20 minutes.

Sainz is the only of Peugeot's four works entries to have had a relatively drama-free Dakar thus far, with Peterhansel's crash adding to Despres' earlier woes and Sebastien Loeb's retirement.

Asked whether Peugeot's problems were down to bad luck, Peterhansel said: “We're creating the bad luck. We're going fast, taking chances, we're not here to go on a Sunday stroll.

“We're here to win races, and when you play that game, sometimes it doesn't go well.

“If we were here to ensure a podium finish, or a top five, there would be fewer problems than what's happening now.”

Additional reporting by Sergio Lillo, translation by Rainier Ehrhardt