Danilo Petrucci, the winner of two MotoGP races, says his move from road racing to rallying for the first time at Dakar 2022 was "a whole different world".
Petrucci is all set to make a unique career switch in 2022 after winding up his MotoGP tenure earlier this month at the Valencia finale. This news came after he lost his Tech 3 KTM ride for next year.
Although he is going to be with KTM and Tech 3 in the coming year, he is going to withstand his dream, which is the famous “Dakar Rally.”
He finished the desert race in Dubai before the end of MotoGP 2021 and continued to prepare after the end of the season.
Talking about Valencia’s final, Petrucci says that his switch to rallying has been a vast adjustment as well as notes that he is still identifying what the rest of the 2022 season will be like.
He said that the one thing he learned in Dakar is everything as it is completely a different world. According to him, the one week of training did more than the distance he did all this year with a MotoGP bike.
Petrucci further adds that he is solely new in this world and feels fortunate enough to know some good skills for riding. He says that the navigation, however, is really significant to understand because, in MotoGP, he had only learned about meters and millimeters on the bike.
In rallies, he talks about kilometers and never knows what exactly is going on. That is why he is trying his luck in Dakar. He also says that after the rally, he will again move with KTM and then decide this remaining year’s plan, like whether he is actually enjoying doing these things or want to do something different.
At the moment, Petrucci is relatively busy preparing for the Dakar rally as he says that he needs some time to recover and understand the race appropriately.
Last weekend, the organizers of Dakar confirmed the details of the 2022 rally. It is going to hold for two weeks, which is from January 1st to January 14th in Saudi Arabia. The Dakar 2022 is the new title of the FIA World Rally Championship and will be part of the FIM Rally Series.