Ultimate Dakar racing team
Well-deserved finish after a dramatic race
Tomas Ourednicek and David Kripal finished the 2019 Morocco Desert Challenge successfully. After the hectic preparations before the start, the technical problems, and the dramatic moments of the freshly rebuilt racing car going up in flames two days ago, reaching the finish line marks the end of a very hard year for the team and – hopefully – the start of something new. Although the crew was around the podium places among the 4x4 cars before the fire, the 30-hour penalty made it impossible to score a good overall result, in the last stage Tomas and David, starting from behind, finished 10th. In the overall classification they climbed up to 26th position, while they are 12th in the 4x4 category and 9th in category T1.1 petrol.
„Reaching the finish line was a very emotional moment for me, I was really touched. Today we started in the order of the overall times and our 30-hour penalty received after the fire meant that we started quite behind. The steering we changed last night was perfect, the whole car worked very well today, we didn’t have any particular problems or adventures. This was an extremely hard race, after all our problems it was sometimes hard to find the motivation to go on, but finally we are here in the finish and this is a very important moment for us. I am very happy and proud of my team, David did an excellent job not only as navigator but also working on the car after the stages, and our mechanics, Kuba Mikulok and Jirka Sivek made unbelievable efforts to make our Phoenix ‘fit’ for the start of the next stage each day. Everything seemed to work against us, but we managed to finish. A bit more than one week ago, our goal was just to be able to start in the race, so the mission is more than hundred percent completed,” Tomas said at the finish line.
“We are very happy to be in the finish line of Morocco Desert Challenge again after the big crash we had last year. Our new car was ready in the last moment, we practically tested it in this race, but now we see what we should work on in the next weeks. We would like to say thanks to our sponsors for their ongoing support and also to our families, friends and fans for the kind and motivating messages – we really appreciated them!” David added.