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Giniel de Villiers reckons the Dakar roadbook is the root of the many navigational errors experienced by most competitors on this year's Dakar “They've made the navigation a bit more challenging, but I think the main factor has been the roadbook has not been very accurate,” the Stellenbosch Toyota star who has suffered the loss of well over an hour in the first week explained.

“It's been quite bad up until now, and that's caused a lot of the confusion. "And, you know, hopefully they can sort that out, because it needs to be more accurate for them to make the navigation difficult. “Because then the good guys that navigate well will still come out on top. At the moment, it is a bit like a lottery, it's not quite how it should be.

“Obviously I am disappointed with where we are in the standings at the moment - we had another bad day again on Friday, getting lost, but the other guys seem to get less lost than we do. “I think only Hirvonen was more lost than us yesterday and we had some other problems. We should be up there, fighting for the lead, the same as Nani - he's obviously doing a great job.

But there's still a long way to go - this second week is a tough week - it's not over yet.”

Discussing the turbocharged diesel Peugeot's advantage over the naturally-aspirated V8 petrol at altitude, de Villiers explained: "It's not difficult to understand, it's a basic physics law of power-to-weight. "The Peugeot is also 400kg lighter than us, and with the same amount of power, so when you get to altitude, where all the power is less, traction is not a problem - which we have a little bit of an advantage with at sea level.

“So the Peugeot is really good at altitude, and I think we've still got work to do, but it's always going to be difficult with the normally-aspirated engine.”