A sleepless night awaits: Juškauskas’s crew, who suffered heavy losses, go in search of details

On Sunday nights, the teams will not have the help of mechanics, they will spend the night only in the bivouac of the riders, and in case of technical problems they will have to solve the problems with their own hands.

This is the challenge facing E. Juškauskas and A. Paliukėnas. The first half of Sunday’s sprint section didn’t promise anything bad. The crew remained in position 27 at the last point on the road at 398 kilometers.

The last 70 kilometers have been waiting for the crew from here, but on this stage the duo have faced the biggest challenges in this rally so far.

According to E. Juškauskas, 70 km before the finish, the front gearbox collapsed. “We drove slowly, we lost about 50 minutes. We have business, but we will stick together ”, the pilot was looking for optimism.

The crew of E. Juškauskas and A. Paliukėnas covered 471 km in 6 hours. 13:08 min. and remained in position 43.

Returning to the bivouac, the duo shared their thoughts on the challenges of the coming night.

“We stop, we explain what we can do, we lost a lot of time, we broke a lot of laps … But here, in the end, there is a long night waiting, we will see what we can do with the front gearbox. For now, the machine is driven by the rear wheels.

We hope that on Monday we will start with all-wheel drive “, expected E. Juškauskas.

“First we will try to hunt down the details in bivouac, and then we will see what we can do,” added the runner to the Igo2Dakar team.

Antanas Juknevičius and Darius Vaičiulis (“Kreda”) have been in trouble since Sunday morning.

The crew completed the stage in 5 hours. 49:49 min. and remained in 38th position. As the duo later admitted, the engine started to warm up as it headed towards the exit, the troubleshooting crew was late to the start, and a brake hose on one wheel broke in the section speed.

“After leaving the bivouac and traveling 10 kilometers, we noticed that the engine was heating up. It turns out that the engine cooling system did not work well. We fixed the system quickly and flew to the start quickly. We were 45 seconds late, maybe whatever fine we could get for speeding. See you later. It’s a shame, but the problems of the day also continued on the track.

We only ride with three brake wheels, one of the wheels did not brake because the brake hose broke. We stopped to grab the hose, sadly we couldn’t maintain a normal running pace the entire day.

Well, what, a marathon with its own charm. We moved to a closed bivouac and we will try to fix the car on Monday, “said A. Juknevičius.

Dakar Rally classification after 7 stages

All terrain vehicles

Motorcycles (Original Motul incl.)

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