Day 4 – Monday, January 4
After working through the night to repair the electronic
gremlins in the Toyota Land Cruiser KXR on Sunday night,
the team was rewarded today with a class victory, after a
stunning performance on the day’s racing to Fiambala.
Driver Xavier Foj piloted the Cooper Tire car through 441
of punishing terrain, which switched from rocks to soft
sand dunes, in 50 degree heat. And, while the team’s
biggest rivals suffered problems because of the extreme
heat, Foj did an amazing job of keeping his car’s
temperature down to a manageable level.
The Toyota’s Cooper Discoverer STT tyres also helped
achieve the victory, performing superbly on the soft sand –
when Foj and his co-driver, Pablo Jaton, were safely at the
service area at the end of the day’s racing, many of their
rivals were still digging themselves out of the sand dunes.
“We are very, very happy,” reports Cooper Tire’s Enrique Bonafonte. “The team worked really
hard, almost all through the night on Sunday, and today they got their reward, despite today’s
stages being very hard work.”
The Toyota Cooper Tire team now lead the T2 class for
production vehicles by some 40 minutes.
Tomorrow’s action will see the teams take in 629km, crossing
the Andes mountains at an altitude of 4000m and crossing the
border into Chile, before heading to the Atacama Desert, renowned as one of the driest places
on earth, to dispute a 203km special stage that will include 100km of sand dunes. The route
ends at Copiaco, in Chile.