HARADH: Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah hit the gas on Tuesday to win stage nine of the Dakar Rally as Saudi Yazeed Al-Rajhi took the lead in the drivers\u2019 standings.<\/p>\n
South African Henk Lategan was dethroned having dominated the standings since stage two and is now 7min 09sec behind the Saudi driver with three days to go.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a messy, messy, messy day for us but it\u2019s not the end of the world, we\u2019re still in it,\u201d said Lategan.<\/p>\n
Five-time champion Al-Attiyah covered the 357km special between Riyadh and Haradh in 2hr 52min 59sec, to keep in touch with a sixth Dakar title.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a good stage. I can be happy with the result. There are three days left, we really have to focus, everything is open,\u201d said Dacia driver Al-Attiyah, who is fourth over 25 minutes behind Al-Rajhi.<\/p>\n
The Qatari finished 2min 47sec ahead of Belgian Guillaume de Mevius\u2019 Mini and 3min 12sec ahead of Al-Rajhi\u2019s Overdrive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did a great job like we planned to,\u201d said Al-Rajhi. \u201cIt won\u2019t be easy, but we will fight to the end. Everything is going well for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having had to open the road following his victory in stage eight, Lategan crossed in his Toyota 11th on the day, 16min 2sec off the pace.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of disaster to be honest,\u201d said Lategan. \u201cIt was really a mess, about 13 km in and we got lost. We thought we missed the way point but we actually had it. It wasn\u2019t great and when we got lost we got one puncture and then towards the end, we got another one and the wheel is actually flat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HARADH: Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah hit the gas on Tuesday to win stage nine of the Dakar Rally as Saudi Yazeed Al-Rajhi took the lead in the drivers\u2019 standings. South African Henk Lategan was dethroned having dominated the standings since stage two and is now 7min 09sec behind the Saudi driver with three days to go. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4716,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4714\/revisions\/4716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}