OREANDA-NEWS. Vladimir Chagin, the manager of the KAMAZ-master team, the sevenfold winner of the Dakar rally, highly appreciated Sergey Kupriyanov’s crew which participated in the Gold of Kagan rally raid driving a KAMAZ equipped with a gas-diesel engine.
The use of this KAMAZ sports truck in the race is an action within a marketing and advertising campaign for gas fuel promotion in Russia. The pilot project was launched last year: propane-butane was used in a similar vehicle. This year, the truck ran on methane. It enhanced racing characteristics, reduced fuel consumption and stabilized engine work.

According to KAMAZ-master’s head, Sergey Kupriyanov’s crew had exclusively positive experience with this truck in the race. The gas-powered KAMAZ proved to be good. The system worked reliably, without a hitch. As an experiment, the crew drove on mixed fuel for two days and on pure diesel fuel during the third day. “We managed to test the vehicles’ operation and consumption,” Vladimir Chagin said. “Fuel consumption was higher by a quarter when pure fuel (without gas) was used, and the vehicle showed greater performance running on mixed fuel (70% diesel fuel, 30% gas): the vehicle gained speed more quickly, the engine was stabler at low RPM, there was less exhaust smoke, and vehicle dynamics was better.” The calculations say that up to 15 percent in monetary terms can be saved, and environmentalists approve of this system.

“And in general, the project we are implementing jointly with VTB and Gazprom seems to me universal and expressive: if we came to a conclusion that it is efficient to use a gas-diesel engine in sport, then these results are much more obvious for civil transportation,” the seven-time Dakar winner noted. “We will continue working on the project, we have a lot of ideas how to improve characteristics of the test racing truck.”