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The Dakar has already passed through Argentina and Chile, and is now into the final stages in Peru.

Bikes

In the bikes, as expected, it’s coming down to Red Bull KTM team-mates Cyril Despres and Marc Coma. They’ve been leaving regular blogs on Red Bull’s Dakar Rally 2012 website. They’ve never been far apart, and their blogs provide nice insight into their current thinking.

Coma, the chaser, realises he has to give it everything to have chance: “I will push as much as I can and maybe that will bring home the win but this is not going to be easy.”

Current leader Despres, on the other hand, is clearly intending to maintain his conservative approach. As he wrote after losing a few seconds to Coma on stage 10: “Maybe those seconds will be important in the end, we’ll have to wait and see. I could have taken more risks out there today but that’s not my style.”

Cars

Meanwhile in the cars, it’s Giniel De Villiers who is closest to the dominant Minis. He too is blogging for Red Bull.

With his Toyota Hilux entry put together at relatively short notice following Volkswagen’s withdrawal, it’s remarkable that he’s running in 3rd, and that it’s not the new Toyota which has suffered with unreliability, but the familiar Hummers. He’s clearly up for the challenge, as he wrote after stage 10:

“We’re running with a standard engine compared to what the Minis have under their hood so with this in mind we’re doing just fine. We’ve tried to push whenever possible and today’s stage suited us better than the others we’ve had in Chile. It was definitely not easy but that’s what we want to see more of. The more difficult the stage, the better it is for us.”

More!

As well as the blogs, the Red Bull site has stage profile videos with Marc Coma, video highlights, and reports. It’ll be interesting to see what the riders in particular have to say as they approach the finish – the bike contest hopefully going down to the wire.