OREANDA-NEWS. December 27, 2010. Four crews of the KAMAZ-master team will participate in the Dakar 2011 international rally raid which will start on the first day of a new year in the city of Buenos Aires.

In all, 6 KAMAZ vehicles will travel along the track of the 33rd off-road marathon which will take place in South America for the third time. Two additional vehicles were prepared by KAMAZ specialists for “clients” – international crews of Astana and X-Raid teams. KAMAZ presented so many sports vehicles at Dakar for the first time.

Already in the mid of November, these race trucks, and also five emergency vehicles and one jeep for convoy, were delivered by the KAMAZ-master team to the French port of Le Havre to be ferried to the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean. On Monday, the 27th of December, all vehicles of KAMAZ and other European participants of the rally raid will be delivered to the capital of Argentina. Then, within three days, the representatives of the teams will drive their vehicles to an indoor park located in the center of Buenos Aires. On the last two days of the calendar year, the organizers of the rally will carry out technical and administrative testing in all classes of vehicles and motorcycles which will participate in Dakar 2011.

Today, on the 27th of December, the racing drivers of KAMAZ will leave for the place where the rally raid will start, after a traditional press conference in the capital of Russia. The head of the team Semyon Yakubov and four pilots of the crews – Vladimir Chagin, Firdaus Kabirov, Ilgizar Mardeev, and Eduard Nikolaev – will meet with Moscow’s journalists in an office of the Interfax Information Agency on 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street (at the Mayakovskaya metro station).

Three sports crews of the KAMAZ-master team of four registered ones will be headed by well-tried Dakar fighters – pilots Vladimir Chagin, Firdaus Kabirov, and Ilgizar Mardeev. Sergey Savostin will again be a navigator in the Tsar’s crew (the “Tsar” is a nickname given to Vladimir Chagin, a sixfold champion of the Dakar race), and Ildar Shaysultanov will be a mechanic. Firdaus Kabirov’s crew underwent no changes: navigator Aydar Belyaev and mechanic Andrey Mokeev will participate in the race together with the twofold Dakar winner. Ilgizar Mardeev’s crew will consist of his “family duo” (Ilgizar Mardeev, the silver medalist of Dakar 2007, as a pilot with his son Ayrat as a mechanic) and navigator Vladimir Demyanenko. As it was promised by Semyon Yakubov, a young trio of KAMAZ-master consisting of pilot Eduard Nikolaev, navigator Vyacheslav Mizyukaev, and mechanic Vladimir Rybakov will also participate in the race. The guys deserved the right to make their debut in Dakar having won in the Silk Way 2010 off-road rally on the route “Saint Petersburg – Sochi”.

The track of Dakar 2011 will be about 9 thousand km long, which is more than 800 km of the actually traveled distance of the previous rally. And besides, there will be only 14 stages this time – against last year’s 15 stages. In other words, the stages will be extremely long and exhausting. And the track itself is much harder to pass: 70% of the route are laid on areas absolutely unknown to the contestants, there are more sandy sections with “fesh-fesh”, fine-dispersed sand, where vehicles can sink to the depth of even more than half a meter. And sand dunes of the Atacama Desert – the driest place in the world, as is generally known – are the highest on the Earth. And you can drive only on their tops: if you go down a slope by accident, you risk sticking forever, as racing drivers say. The crews and their vehicles will have to get over passes up to 4,800 meters high on the border of Argentina and Chile. This time, the caravan of the rally will reach the extreme northern point on Chile’s map as much as possible approaching the equator on the territory of this country. The city of Arica has been known to our football fans already since 1962 when the USSR team participated in the world’s championship.

And the race will be held at the height of summer on this South American continent when temperature goes beyond 50 degrees Celsius in the daytime. Nevertheless, amateurs and professionals of the most extreme motor sport – off-road race – are not afraid of forthcoming difficulties and trials. The number of those who wish to try their strength on the tracks of the marathon considerably increased. 430 crews and single racing drivers on a greater number of vehicles (by 68 units more than in 2010) will participate in the Dakar 2011 rally. 68 crews of them will drive trucks – against 52 ones at Dakar-2010. MAN, the German truck producer and one of the main rivals of the KAMAZ-master team in previous years, returned to the race. After a severe injury, Gerard de Rooy returned to compete on IVECO. The young Dutchman supported by his father Jan have been trying to take the Dakar crown from the Russian crews for already ten years. The Czech crews on Tatra and LIAZ vehicles became stronger with their new equipment. The Dutch-Belgian, French, German, Austrian, and mixed international crews of teams on GINAF, DAF, Mercedes, Reanult, IVECO, and other trucks gained experience too. One can expect an acute struggle in this class from the first stages and right up to the finish on the 15th of January in Buenos Aires.