Paulo Gonçalves was probably designed by a spine. For some of the colleagues, the Dakar has lost the flame.
“In the images of the accident you can see a speed bump about 100 meters before the crash site. When it is projected at 150 km / h, and we have to assume that this happened, we must expect the worst,” Heinz said on Monday. Kinigadner, who raced the Dakar and is currently a consultant for the KTM team.
The Austrian was one of the rare ones to coldly analyze the most striking deadly fall of the hardest all-terrain event in the world since, in 1992, he took the life of the Frenchman Gilles Lalay. Among the motards in the race, who yesterday had a day of stopping in honor of Paulo Gonçalves, the words were only of pain. “There’s no desire to get on the bike. I’m just thinking about what I’m doing here, my desire is to go home,” said Laia Sanz, a Spaniard who was a colleague at Honda for the “sport gentleman”, as she called “Speedy.” .
Yesterday, in Wadi Al Dawasir, Saudi Arabia, Hero announced the abandonment of the race for riders and staff to join Paulo Gonçalves’ family, and should attend a funeral that will be in Gemeses, Esposende, but still with a date set. , because the pilot’s body should only be moved to Portugal today or tomorrow. It was for the team, reduced to the Indian Santosh – the Portuguese Joaquim Rodrigues and Sebastien Buhler left after the accident – that Gonçalves was known to have suffered “serious head, neck and spine injuries”.
“I was going full speed when I saw a motorcycle down. It’s never good when it’s in a high speed zone. When I arrived I saw Paulo on the ground. I realized it was serious, I called the helicopter and we did everything we could, but there was no answer “Unfortunately, I was not responding,” said Australian Toby Price, who in the meantime had received Slovakian Stefan Svitko’s company. Price, who was discounted downtime, being fourth overall, assured that “there was nothing to do” and admitted that he later reached the end of the “dehydrated with tears” stage.
A friend of “Speedy”, who in 2017 helped him when he broke his leg, Price says accidents like this “are nobody’s fault, it was his time,” but admitted that the stage was too fast, “averaging 120 km. /H”. And it was Kinigadner, cooler, telling Speedweek the dangers of steps like this: “I spoke to Nani Roma, who told me that roadblocks were noted in those miles on the roadbook. But you can’t write all the bosses in the book, and so can he. I told myself that none justified slowing down. So if you have all your weight on the bike, a 30 or 40 cm bump can have devastating effects. If you don’t see it, the bounce will make the handlebars jump. Matthias Walkner already told me which on average lives dangers of these four times at each stage. The Dakar will always be dangerous. “
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