As her driver Javier Burillo remains hospitalised following a rollover in July’s Baja España Aragón, navigator Sonia Ledesma was livid after another team did not answer the distress call sent out. She spoke out about the race and the incident for the first time in a social media post on Monday, explaining it “took me more than a week to have the strength to write this.”
Burillo and Ledesma flipped their #652 Mitsubishi Pajero fifty-four kilometres into the first stage on Friday, 21 July in what the latter called a “slight rollover with serious consequences.” Alongside emergency services and nearby spectators, the #653 team of Jorge Rivera and Daniel Rivera and the #656 of Ángel Giménez and Maria Pilar Benages arrived on the scene to provide assistance, which Ledesma commended as the teams putting “aside their careers to save two lives, you are angels on Earth.”
While Ledesma gave her gratitude for those who stopped to help, she also recalled seeing one car continue to race. After the accident, she activated the SOS signal on her car’s Stella tracking system, which sends a notification to race control who in turn relays the message to competitors in the accident’s vicinity. Ledesma noted they failed to respond when the SOS call was still active and as others on site flagged them down for help.
She did not name the offending team but said she knew “perfectly well who you are and that I also know the race went quite well” for them. Denouncing them as “people who should be stripped of the title of human being,” Ledesma stated she is “glad” they had a strong finish “because now, in addition to having a plot of Hell reserved for you, you have a plastic trophy in your house that will remind you every day of your lives that you are a piece of shit.”
Burillo was taken to hospital shortly after being extracted from the car.
“We are by your side, pushing with all the strength we have left,” concluded Ledesma. “One day, this will just be a bad dream that we will try to erase with a few beers and some many patxarans.”
