“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.” – Anakin Skywalker

Like a certain 19-year-old Jedi, the stars of Rallye Breslau were probably not the biggest proponents of fine granular material following Monday’s stage. Like the stormtroopers that kid would go on to lead 26 years later, they probably didn’t enjoy forests either.

Stage 1 was nicknamed the “Sand & Forest Challenge” because its route blended sandy straightaways with technical forest sections. Thomas Jolliffe, who would finish third in Extreme Car Open, noted his main focus was on protecting coolant and gearbox oil temperatures during the stage: while the sand increased temps, deeper mud sections brought them back down.

With the back-and-forth nature of the route, the leaderboard was also shaken up.

Jeremy Knuiman, the top bike in the Prologue, crashed 100 kilometers in and broke his navigation tower, relegating him to 14th in class. Edvard Sokolovskij and Dovydas Karka comprised a Lithuanian 1–2, separated by just eight seconds.

On the ATV side, the Polish defended their home turf with ease as Adam Krysiak led Karol Slugocki and Jerzy Makedonski by 12:33 and 20:23, respectively.

Fellow Pole Marcin Graczyk was the only Cross-Country competitor to finish the stage in under two hours as he held off Lithuania’s Arūnas Simanavičius and Emilija Gelažninkienė. Simanavičius was also the closest to beat the two-hour line, just narrowly missing out with a time of 2:00:01.23. Likewise, Hardo Mere’s HM7 Proto was the lone Extreme car to clear that mark.

Torsten Wilk won the stage for CC Car Limited, albeit partly by surviving as all of his classmates did not finish. It wasn’t an entirely clean day for Wilk either as his G-Wagen got two minutes slapped on for a missed waypoint early on.

Like Poland in ATV, the Netherlands swept the CC Truck Big podium with William Van Groningen ahead of William van de Krol and Hans van der Sanden. Conversely, the Dutch also comprised the bottom of the category’s leaderboard after a steering rod broke on Geralt Van’t Blik’s truck just one kilometer from the finish. After some hasty fixes, the truck reached the finish with the rod clinging on by a single bolt and tension strap.

Stage 1 winners

Cross-Country

Class	Number	Competitor	Team	Total Time
ATV	3	Adam Krysiak	Polaris Polska Racing Team	2:10:53.63
Car Limited	203	Torsten Wilk	TH Racing	3:03:21.38
Car Open	228	Remigiusz Wutkowski	Wutkowski Motorsport	2:03:45.37
Enduro	91	Edvard Sokolovskij	AG Dakar School	2:07:51.87
SSV	452	Marcin Graczyk	Martin Racing Team	1:58:12.59
Truck Big	601	William Van Groningen	Dust Warriors	4:34:00.00
Truck Small	605	Jürgen Hellgeth	Hellgeth Engineering	2:13:21.61

Extreme

Class	Number	Competitor	Team	Total Time
Car Limited	308	Serge Lestrade	Lestrade	3:42:20.91
Car Open	301	Hardo Mere	HM Racing Team	1:54:13.49
Truck Big	659	Guido Neubert	Tim Kidszun	3:02:40.12
Truck Small	660	Patrick Toepfer	MZB	2:35:57.22

Featured image credit: Plamen Kodrov / RBI Media