Molly Taylor has dropped out of the top 10 of the SSV class at the Dakar Rally after hitting a rock late on Stage 10.
Taylor was 10th-quickest to the penultimate waypoint, at Kilometre 327 of the special, just before a wheel was torn off her Can-Am.
After more than an hour spent undergoing roadside repairs, vehicle #408 was patched up and she drove on to the finish line at Bisha, but has fallen from 10th to 13th overall.
“Today wasn’t such a successful day,” said the 2016 Australian Rally Champion on Instagram.
“It was all going quite well, [then] about 330km into the stage – so, 40km to go – we were just driving along in some really deep, sandy ruts – quite fast – and there was a rock just on the inside.
“I don’t know if it was hidden by sand or something but I honestly didn’t see it at all and next thing I knew, we just had this massive thud and the front-right wheel exited stage right, so that was very disappointing.
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“We had to stop, obviously, and try to repair it, so huge shout-out to the crews that stopped to assist us and lend us some of the parts that we needed to put the car back together.
“We were able to do a bit of a fix and enough to get us through the rest of the stage and back to the bivouac, but very heartbreaking to have another day where we lost, I think, about an hour [and] 15 [minutes] this time.”
She added, “We’ve got two more days to make the most of what Dakar gives us, and we’ll keep going out there and giving it our best every time.”
Team-mate Austin Jones still leads overall in SSV.
Other classes
In Trucks, Dmitry Sotnikov beat Eduard Nikolaev to the stage win and now lead his Kamaz-Master team-mate by 10:18s at the top of the overall classification.
In Quads, Alexandre Giroud (Yamaha Racing – SMX) remains the front-runner, and likewise Francisco Lopez Contardo (EKS – South Racing) in Light Prototypes.
The penultimate stage, a loop around Bisha featuring a 346km special, starts late this afternoon (AEDT).
CLICK HERE for Bikes report
CLICK HERE for Cars report
CLICK HERE for extended highlights of Stage 10
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