Colleagues throw party for Emanuel Gyenes, winner of 2015 Dakar Rally marathon class

Colleagues at the Autonet Satu Mare (northwestern Romania) Company welcomed biker Emanuel 'Mani' Gyenes with a cake after his victory in the marathon class of the 2015 Dakar Rally; the company was also his sponsor.

Photo credit: (c) eANDINA / XINHUA ARCHIVE

Mani briefly related his fifth participation in this competition.

'I've made it to the finish of Dakar. I'm very happy I got here and won the marathon class. In the general ranking I ended 21st. It's a good position, but I'm not exactly happy; I could have placed better, were it not for the technical troubles,' he said.

According to the biker, the conditions were very harsh, with temperatures ranging from minus 5 to plus 50 degrees (Celsius) and tracks through salt water, which impacted the engine. The toughest point was in the 2nd stage, when he found himself out of oil.

'After the second stage, the first thing that came to my mind was I should abandon. I would have, too, probably, if Dakar was still in Africa, because I was out of engine oil, so I went ahead for 20 km until I found some bystanders who gave me some oil and helped me fix the leak. That's how I managed to finish. Over the 40 minutes it took to remedy the failure, the quads passed me; they were the biggest problem, those 400 kilometres I sort of gave up psychically, being unable to concentrate. It's all I thought of, being unable to pass the quads; when you get 15-20 metres behind them, you have no visibility,' Gyenes related.

To make it tougher, his 2012 KTM bike was unable to reach speeds above 120 km/h at higher altitudes, where better performing engines were even capable of 160 km/h.

Besides Autonet, the company he works for, the Municipality of Satu Mare and the County Council also sponsored...