The team at Toyota Motorsport sighed a massive sigh of relief on Friday 12th December 2014, when the two locally developed and built Imperial Toyota Hilux race vehicles left the workshop in Barbeque Downs – next stop Buenos Aires. The two newly completed race vehicles (piloted by Giniel de Villiers and Leeroy Poulter, with Dirk von Zitzewitz and Rob Howie doing navigating duty), together with a third bakkie, built for Saudi WRC driver Yazeed Al-Rajhi, will be on the start line for the 2015 Dakar which kicks off on January 4th in the Argentine capital.
It took a gargantuan effort to not only build, test and prepare the race vehicles for shipping, but to also beat the deadline for packing the six tons of additional equipment that accompanied the vehicles when they departed last week. As in the past, the mass of gear was shipped to South America by SAA Cargo, and will initially be trucked from Buenos Aires to Toyota Argentina’s assembly facility at Zerate. Once at the facility in Zerate, the partially disassembled race-vehicles will be returned to race trim, and prepared for a pre-race shakedown on January 2nd. While the offiial start of the Dakar is on January 4th, in reality the race started much earlier for the Toyota Imperial South African Dakar Team.
This is Toyota South Africa Motorsport’s fourth year of participation in the world’s toughest motorsport event. As such the crew works like a well-oiled machine, and thanks to certain changes in the regulations, as well as significant testing and development during 2014, there is an air of expectancy in the camp. The race gets under way in Buenos Aires on January 4th, 2015. The route then stretches into Chile and Bolivia, before returning to Argentina for the finale. This year’s race will be run in a continent-sized loop, and as such will end back in Buenos Aires on January 17th.
