Sébastien Ogier and Oliver Solberg have explained their retirements from first and second place of Safari Rally Kenya.
Nine-time world champion Ogier was one of the three provisional podium-dwelling Toyota drivers to retire on the Sleeping Warrior stage. Like erstwhile leader Solberg, Ogier’s GR Yaris Rally1 stopped on the road sectopn with an alternator issue after the car ingested mud in the morning’s final test.
Ogier said: “We got the alarm on the finish line of the Sleeping Warrior – alternator issue and then the road section was unfortunately a bit too long to reach the service park. We tried everything we could on the road section to fix it try to find a way to make this alternator running again, but unfortunately it didn’t, and yeah, we had to retire.
“It looks like some mud is coming in. I think I’ve been told that one of our cars actually managed to fix it. It also had an issue, but managed to somehow put clean water on it again and it started running again. We did that too, but unfortunately it didn’t solve our issue. I changed the belt, did everything I could do, but it wasn’t enough.”