Dakar rally - Tina Thörner "Gladiator genes"

Swedish co-driver Tina Thörner in the BMW X-raid team reports everyday on her Dakar blog from the stages. This is her latest entry - stage 13

Waking up this morning at 06.00, to a glourious day. As always, Chichi stays in bed as long as he possibly can, 30 minutes left, that´s when he usually gets up. So for me this means going down to have breakfast, and then I always bring him 2 rolls, one banana and some juice.

Today we had to start as 15th car, so there were 8 cars ahead of us going slower, a game from the first kilometer, passing the 50km we had already overtaken 5 and then hunting down the rest in the dust. We´ve become used to that by now. To maintain our fifth position we had to overtake yet another car, and since there are speeding zones, 30km/h or 50km/h, we went anyways and this ofcourse put up a small quarrel with Sousa. I believe that male are made out of Gladiator genes (I´m quite certain), ofcourse there was fuss about the situation, finally I just had to step in and say stop.Sometimes it just gets to much. It was the exact thing going on between Nasser and Sainz, bumping into eachother and all. You just get astonished being a woman overseing this. There is a lot of coaching needed here ;-)

We had a super day, given where we started, finally we finished 3rd. Team mate Peterhansel was the fastest, ahead of Nasser ahead of us, and then there was Sainz. Then all four drivers had to go to the racing management promising to carry things out tomorrow with sportman ship. Has never been such a fight in the history of Dakar. You can imagine running 15 days and only have 2 minutes and 49 seconds difference between two teams - that´s impressive and cool!

Thank you for all the nice and friendly messages, feels wonderful to know that we have such a strong support! One of the questions I received was from Fredrick who wanted to know how good of a mechnic I am. I am certainly no mechanic, but due to all the problems we´ve encountered during this trip I´ve improved so much. Give me a few days more, and I´ll be able to quickly fix just about anything on the car. Chichi is the one with the knows-how, I am just the assistance - and that´s whats called team work!
   

I already finished the road book for tomorrow, so now it´s time for dinner and talk. The stretch tomorrow is very "straight and changing of roads". Also the place where Chichi last year broke his car and lost two hours! He wants to go for the stage win tomorrow, so I quote Nasser "Inschala" (don´t know if thats the correct spelling)

LET THE BEST TEAM WIN! 

Have a glorious Saturday and read my last entry tomorrow.
Warm greetings from a 35 degree Santa Rosa!