De Villiers wins special stage 9 of Dakar Rally 2022

Hi, friends!

South African Giniel de Villiers finally won the special stage of this year's edition of Dakar Rally 2022. I don't write it just like that because de Villiers in a long time competitors on the hardest rally on Earth.

Almost always connected with Toyota because their activities were connected with Toyota South Africa who started their adventure as a semi-private team, de Villiers profiled himself to the works driver and that is the way for him for years now.

He had some troubles on this edition of the Dakar because he had clashes with some bikers on stages and he was even penalized with 5h time penalty but later he got vindication of penalty after biker revealed that de Villiers couldn't see him because of the dunes. It's got that nobody got killed in the accident. Anyway everyone should care about people around them because it is nothing new seeing that some riders/drivers got killed in an accidents during the years that I follow Dakar Rally.

So de Villiers got vindication of the penalty but rally leader Nasser Al-Attiyah got 5 minute penalty today because his seat belts wasn't good strapped on the crew after they changed the punctured tire on the special stage 8 yesterday. That favor goes to Seb Loeb who is still more then half an hour behind Nasser and there is only three special stages left in the rally.

We know how strong is the Loeb but we also know that Saudi Arabia is terrain which Nasser Al-Attiyah knows very good and it should suit him good until the last km of the race.

So all three works Toyota Hilux cars were in the top positions on special stage nine with de Villiers winning, with another South African Hank Lategan 2nd and Al-Attiyah 3rd. Mattias Ekstrom finished 4th for the Audi and Seb Loeb was 5th in the Bahrain Extreme Raid Hunter.

Al-Attiyah leads Loeb, Yazeed Al-Rajhi is still 3rd overall in Overdrive Toyota, Orlando Terranova is 4th in another Bahrain Extreme Raid Hunter while de Villiers is 5th overall.

Let the best win - as always...

Here is the VIDEO LINK of 16 minute coverage of special stage 9:
https://www.redbull.com/int-en/episodes/dakar-rally-2022-stage-9

Credit for photos and videos to Dakar and Youtube.

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