Toby Price needed to emerge from the Dakar Rally's mid-race rest day by playing a day of catch-up in the Saudi Arabian desert.
Instead, the Australian motorcycle ace finds his hopes of winning a hat-trick of titles disappearing like sand between his fingers after he lost another place in the overall standings on what he admitted was a "tough" Sunday.
With five stages left, he is now in sixth place, more than half an hour behind American leader Ricky Brabec and the titanic two-bike race going on at the front of the field in the world's toughest rally.
Having moved up to fifth and less than 30 minutes off the lead going into the break, the 36-year-old Red Bull KTM rider had hoped to resume on stage seven, the longest single-day slog in the race at 483km, by making inroads into Honda star Brabec's lead.
Instead, he could only finish eighth on the seventh stage between the capital Riyadh and Al Duwadimi as Brabec's Chilean teammate Jose Florimo won the day to gain his third stage triumph of this year's race.
"A tough day for me on the longest stage of the race. I rode well but it was hard to make good time from the front as the navigation was really tricky," Price reported on X.
He reckoned some of the later starters were able to make up a lot of ground as he struggled, and the bad news for him was that Argentina's defending champion, Kevin Benavides, was able to leapfrog him into fifth place.
Price's fellow Australian Daniel Sanders, on his GasGas bike, was sixth on the stage and is now seventh overall, just one place and six minutes 41 seconds behind his compatriot.
Incredibly, after 2865km, Brabec leads by just a single second from Botswana's Hero rider Ross Branch.
That gap, after 32 and a half hours of racing, comes down to effectively about 24 metres, race organisers have calculated.
"One second difference is crazy - that's a tight race for sure," Brabec said.
In the cars category, nine-time world champion Sebastien Loeb, in his Bahrain Raid Xtreme Hunter, enjoyed his third stage win to cut Carlos Sainz's lead to 19 minutes after the Spaniard's Audi suffered a puncture.
