Two stage victories, 11 stages out of 15 finished in the Top 5, 49 points scored in the world rally-raid championship and an anecdotal 10th place finish. This is the Dakar 2023 balance sheet for Guerlain Chicherit and GCK Motorsport. Beyond these figures, the pilot and his team will have marked the spirits and collected valuable information for the rest of their plural programs.
Last September, when he announced his participation in two Dakars (2023, 2024) and a full season in the W2RC world championship (2023) at the wheel of a Prodrive Hunter, Guerlain Chicherit immediately displayed his ambition to “play in front “. Bet won! Victorious at the Rallye of Morocco a month later, the GCK Motorsport driver distinguished himself daily in the Dakar 2023, winning two stages (3, 14) and finishing 11 times in the points. This regularity at the top of the timesheets allows him today to point to 3rd place in the W2RC ranking with 49 points, behind the winner of the Dakar 2023 Nasser Al-Attiyah (85 points) and his runner-up Sébastien Loeb (87 points). Four events remain to be contested in this championship which saw Guerlain Chicherit triumph in 2009, when we were still talking about the Rally-Raid World Cup.
Of this Dakar 2023, Guerlain Chicherit and his co-driver Alex Winocq will also remember the five punctures that occurred during the 2nd stage and the power steering failure in the 4th stage, two episodes which will have earned them 5h30 to lose on the future final winner . Enough to feed some regrets if we put this deficit in perspective with the 5h22 separating this evening the French crew from the victorious duo Attiyah-Baumel (Toyota). No doubt that an overall podium was within reach, but with some…
By finishing the 2023 Dakar with a vehicle powered by sustainable biofuel, GCK Motorsport is also ticking the first box of the GCK Group roadmap. Because while the rally was taking place in Saudi Arabia, the group was continuing to develop its hydrogen in France, capable of meeting all the constraints – performance, endurance, robustness – imposed by the most difficult race in the world. To be continued…
Guerlain Chicherit: “Congratulations to Nasser and Mathieu for their victory as well as to Sébastien and Fabian for their fantastic comeback. Alex and I finish with the satisfaction of having been able to remobilize after the frustrating 2nd stage, at the end of which we had already lost all chance of winning the rally. The car suffered… and so did I. The cars have become so efficient that they take us to the limits of our bodies. It even went as far as a brief loss of consciousness. concerning the landing of a jump. Despite the pain, we hung several Top 5 in the second part of the rally, allowing us to make a good operation in the perspective of the championship. We know what we have to do to improve the Prodrive Hunter and we have collected valuable data to develop our e-Blast H2.”
