Toyota trucks leave for Dakar
Toyota Motorsport's Hilux pickups that will contest the 8 300-kilometre 15-day Dakar Rally in South America in January are due to leave
this week.
SAA will fly the trucks, together with four tons of spare parts and equipment, in one of its Airbus passenger jets to Buenos Aires in
Argentina this week. The Dakar Rally starts in the Argentine resort city of Mar del Plata on 1 January and finishes in Peru's capital Lima
on the 15th.
"It's been a wild ride already," said a relieved Rob Howie of Toyota Motorsport. "Once the official announcement was made
at the Johannesburg International Motor Show early in October that Toyota Motorsport would contest the Dakar Rally... we've been flat-out
preparing the [pickups] for this great adventure. In between, both pickups have competed in the final two rounds of the Absa South African
Off-Road Championship and also participated in five days of testing in the sand dunes of the Namib Desert. That was a major logistical
exercise on its own. We had a final shakedown test near Bapsfontein on Wednesday of both Imperial Toyotas as well as a third Hilux we have
built for an Argentine privateer. All three drivers, Giniel de Villiers, Duncan Vos and Lucio Alvarez, were on hand and successfully
completed around 50 kilometres without any problems."
Howie is the co-driver for Vos and it will be their first Dakar Rally. De Villiers and co-driver Dirk von Zitzewitz of Germany won the
Dakar Rally in South America in 2009.
"We are mightily relieved that we've met the SAA deadline," continued Howie. "The pressure has been huge throughout the
nine weeks since the JIMS announcement and for the last four weeks we have been working 24/7 to achieve this. We've had to partially
disassemble the vehicles so that they can fit on individual pallets in the passenger cargo hold of the SAA Airbus. We've also had to
individually wrap all the larger spare components and pack hundreds of boxes of smaller spares and equipment for stowage in a container. Now
we have a couple of weeks off to spend with our families over Christmas before we fly to Buenos Aires on 26 December."
The team will be reassembling the vehicles at Toyota Argentina's plant in Zarate, 100 kilometres north of Buenos Aires, before a pre-race
test and shakedown at Toyota's 4x4 test track on 28 December.
The following day the race vehicles will be transported the 450 kilometres to the Argentine coastal resort city of Mar del Plata, where
they will be scrutineered on 31 December before the rally starts there on 1 January.
-Toyota-