Dakar Rally 2026 continued on Monday with Stage 2 from Yanbu to Alula, and Buggyra ZM Racing’s truck crews seemed to hand over the baton of technical troubles from one to the other. Martin Soltys, together with Vlastimil Miksch and Tomas Sikola, fought their way from the back of the starting order up to seventh place in today’s stage. Karel Posledni, with Petr Schweiner and Filip Skrobanek, had the stage going well, but was slowed by similar technical issues to those Soltys faced yesterday – at kilometre 199 they had to deal with a turbo problem and lost around two hours on the spot. Despite the major delay, they eventually reached the finish and were classified 21st for the stage.
“Unfortunately, we broke one wheel at kilometre 15, which was a huge disappointment. On top of that we stopped in a bad place and had to jack the truck up very high, which took a lot out of us, and the next roughly 150 kilometres were full of dust – we overtook a lot of vehicles and the track was pretty much hell,” said Martin Soltys. “But the last 200 kilometres were a joy to drive. There were fewer vehicles, even though we were still overtaking and it was still very dusty. Still, we finally got to drive properly, found our rhythm and I’m happy to be seventh. That means we’ll start somewhere near the front tomorrow, which I’m glad about, because I was worried it might take us several days to get back to the leading positions,” he added.
Karel Posledni was pleased with the opening part of the stage, when the driving was great. “Then we had a tyre blowout, so we changed it and continued at race pace. Another puncture came before the neutralisation, we only kept inflating the tyre, and at the pit stop the guys changed it for us,” said Posledni before delivering more bad news. “Then, still before the neutralisation, the turbo failed. We repaired it for about two hours, maybe even more, and then we set off again and prayed for that one remaining spare tyre. Luckily we’re here. We’re looking forward to tomorrow. We don’t even know our time loss or our position, but we made it to the finish,” Posledni concluded.
Dakar continues on Tuesday with Stage 3, Alula–Alula, featuring a 422-kilometre special and 314 kilometres of liaisons (736 km in total).
