Dakar 2022, stage 1, TOYOTA GAZOO Racing,: Al-Attiyah tops the timesheets on first stage in Dakar!

Nasser Al-Attiyah has taken a commanding stage win on Sunday. The first major stage of the race brought big difficulties for many competitors, but Al-Attiyah benefitted from the circumstances in the loop stage around Ha’il. After the prologue win on Saturday the Toyota Gazoo Racing ace chose to start in P10 and that helped him a lot. The competitors with the best navigation skills had the better chance to succeed and Al-Attiyah did so with his co-driver Mathieu Baumel. They were fastest in the stage and already lead the overall classification with quite a margin. “It was incredible, because it was a really tricky stage”, Al-Attiyah said after the stage. “I expected it to be more straightforward. Mathieu did an outstanding job, especially in the second part of the stage. There was a time when we saw a track that went a bit too far to the right, and he said, ‘no, turn left’, and then, when we got to the next waypoint, we saw we were on the right track. Then, we drove at the front with Seb and pushed hard. I’m