Dakar 2023: Stage 11 - Rainbow loses headlight in tough dunes

The eleventh stage of the Dakar Rally 2023 was a serious, difficult, but also very beautiful one. Gerrit Zuurmond steered his MAN to the finish with the sixteenth time, but did not reach it without color cracks. He lost a headlight and part of the bumper in a collision with a dune.
At the marathon bivouac in the Empty Quarter, Gerrit Zuurmond, Tjeerd van Ballegooij and Klaas Kwakkel took care of the damage. Some plastic was missing from the MAN and the headlight. The inhospitable desert took some toll on the Rainbow Truck Team.
"It was a particularly tough day," Zuurmond told us. "With very large dunes, with left and right of those big coves in them. You really had to pay very close attention, but we did reasonably well."
The MAN came to a halt a few times. Once the truck was stuck in the sand, once they got a flat tire in the dunes and once they collided with a dune. "We came down a dune steeply and bumped into another one at the bottom," Zuurmond explained. "That one didn't give way, so that's where we lost some plastic, lost the headlight and broke the bumper."
Zuurmond and his were still out of the test just before it got dark, though, and Zuurmond was very happy about that. "I shouldn't think about being in these dunes in the dark. Brrr. I know one thing for sure: after this Dakar I will never worry about dunes again. If you can ride here, you can ride anywhere."
That will also be the motto for the twelfth stage. After all, the second part of the marathon, back to Shaybah, also has lots of dunes again. It is 375 kilometers in total, of which 185 kilometers count for the race.

Automatic translation from the original Dutch version