Tradition has once again been done.
Kamazas again dominated the Dakar Rally with another stunning victory.
Indeed, in its this year’s installment, which took place from January 6 to 20, two of the company’s factory crews were on the podium – taking first and third places.
The third of the factory crews, meanwhile, reached the finish line in tenth place. The edition prepared this year represented the 40th.
edition of this iconic event, which was originally called Paris-Dakar, as it started in the French capital and then ran through Africa.
Political perturbations and, above all, the lack of guarantees of being able to ensure absolute safety for participants, however, led organizers a decade ago to move it to much more peaceful South America.
Perhaps the above constituted a certain break with the legend created earlier, but from the sporting side itself it did not come out of the competition at all for the worse.
On the contrary – the wilderness of America sometimes turns out to be much more difficult than the wilderness of Africa.
In turn, this increase in the degree of difficulty only increases the attractiveness of the entire event.
And, after all, from the purely commercial side, the above is the issue.
Nevertheless, at the same time – as in the past – the rally is a very big challenge for the people and equipment taking part.
In the case of the latter, with such sometimes extreme operating conditions, there is therefore an incredible opportunity to test a number of new solutions and technologies, which in serial productions will be commercialized only in some time.
The route of the 40th jubilee edition of the Dakar, including the previous ones.
edition of the Dakar, including earlier editions of the historic Paris-Dakar, passed through three South American countries – Peru, Bolivia and Argentina – and consisted of 14 stages.
A total of 344 vehicles were entered for it, including: 143 motorcycles, 50 quads, 92 cars, 14 UTVs and 44 trucks.
The length of the route was:
- for car crews – 8792 km, of which 4339 km were special sections;
- For motorcyclists and quad riders – 4134 km of special sections.
The factory Kamaz Master team fielded four crews in Dakar 2018.
Individual units were manned by the following competitors:
- Starting number 500 – Eduard Nikolayev, Yevgeny Yakovlev, Vladimir Rybakov;
- Starting number 502 – Dmitry Sotnikov, Ruslan Akhmadyev, Ilnur Mustafin – so Sotnikov’s pilot remained Ruslan Akhmadyev, and, as in the Silk Way Rally, Ilnur Mustafin acted as on-board mechanic;
- Starting number 503 – Airat Mardeev, Aydar Belyaev, Dmitry Svistunov;
- Starting number 515 – Anton Shibalov, Dmitrii Nikitin, Ivan Romanov.
Kamazas in two special versions were used here.
Dmitry Sotnikov drove the new 43509 variant under test, with a Caterpillar/Gyrtech 6-cylinder inline 12.5-liter engine, built for the upcoming homologation standards – the regulations that will apply from Dakar 2019.
Propulsion of the Type 4326, on the other hand, was provided by an 8-cylinder, forked, 16-liter Liebherr diesel engine.
It features a maximum power output of 1,000 hp, allowing acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h in just 11.5 seconds.
A 16-speed transmission is used for transmission.
The leaders of this team were Eduard Nikolaev and Ayrat Mardeev, supported by another rising star – Dmitry Sotnikov.
All are from Tatarstan and were tasked with leading the team to another win.
And they achieved that goal. 
The event began with a start in Lima, to which the crews returned after a five-year break.
The finish line was set for the first time in Cordoba, Argentina.
The competition in the truck category was one of the extremely tough and fierce, and Kamaz’s final victory in it did not seem so obvious at first.
This temperature of the battle was skillfully strengthened and fueled by other teams.
In fact, even before the start, many experts pointed out that although Kamaz Master has very good equipment, but in this sphere others are not far behind.
As worthy opponents the Russians themselves pointed out, among others.
Competitors driving IVECOs, MAZs and Tatras.
And in these reckonings they were not mistaken.
Particularly hard pressed were precisely the riders in MAZs and IVECOs.
MAZ, incidentally, won a stage for the first time in the history of the rally.
This happened after the 11.
Stage, that is, on Wednesday, January 17.
On that occasion, the driver of the fastest MAZ – Sergey Vyazovich of the factory MAZ-SPORTavto team – climbed to third place in the general classification at the time.
On the other hand, three days earlier, i.e. on Sunday, January 14, the first victory of the new Kamaz took place – on that day it was secured by Dmitry Sotnikov, second in the 2017 Dakar Rally.
His premiere Kamaz – type 43509 on the route to Tupiza turned out to be 5 minutes faster than the IVECO driven by Federico Villagry.
Ajrat Mardeev and Eduard Nikolaev, meanwhile, then introduced two more Kamazes into the top four.
The competition on the road proved not only difficult and fierce, but also marked by serious problems.
Such troubles are evidenced, for example, by the fact that one of the factory Kamaz crews – driving the unit marked with the number 515 – had to withdraw from the route.
Anton Shibalov, Dmitry Nikitin and Ivan Romanov were namely excluded from the Dakar Rally after the stage to Chilecito.
The 14th ranked team had technical problems after a truck fire the previous day, as a result of which they missed checkpoints.
However, missing waypoints traditionally means only a time penalty.
Kamaz Master then said in a press release that it considered the exclusion too harsh a penalty, and the team was significantly weakened.
All the more so because Shibalov acted as a quick service technician for the other three Kamaz cars.
In this situation, spare parts were loaded onto Dmitry Sotnikov’s car.
The final triumph of Kamaz Master became quite real at the very end of the event, as only after the 12th stage the Kamaz with the side number 500 and the crew consisting of Eduard Nikolaev, Yevgeny Yakovlev and Vladimir Rybakov were in the lead.
They took this lead thanks to their third place on the stage on Thursday, January 18.
In second place overall – with a loss of just one second – at that point were Federico Villagra, Ricardo Torlaschi and Adrian Yacopini of IVECO, and in third place was MAZ, with Sergey Vyazovich, Pavel Haranin and Andriy Zhulin driving.
In the end, the winner of the truck class competition was Kamaz with starting number 500, driven by Eduard Nikolaev.
Thus, he already achieved his third triumph in the Dakar.
He owes this triumph to, among others. thanks to the fact that he was the only driver among the four participating Kamaz factory vehicles who managed to avoid serious time losses in the early stages of the marathon, with the leader having been in the lead for only two days.
In addition, he still had to fend off an unexpected late challenge from the De Rooy IVECO group driver, the aforementioned Federico Villagry, who even briefly took the lead, and then – before the final two stages – was only a second behind the Russians.
Unfortunately, in the end this Argentine offensive ended in failure due to a gearbox failure on the penultimate day.
As a result, it allowed Nikolaev to reach the finish line with relative ease and succeed in the overall classification.
Nonetheless, it was this serious adversity at Villagra that allowed second place to go to Sergey Vyazovich in the MAZ, who arrived at the finish line a whopping four hours after the winner.
Third place, in turn, went to Kamaz team coordinator Ayrat Mardeev.
He was a previous Dakar champion and now made it into the top three, despite losing more than five hours to Nikolaev.
At the same time, the great bad luck of Federico Villagra of De Rooy IVECO did not mean that this team’s struggle was completely in vain.
After all, the victory on the last stage went to another driver of this team – Ton van Genugten, who, by the way, recorded a total of as many as four stage victories in the field in this year’s rally.
Overall, the entire competition in the truck category was completed by only 18 crews, recall, out of 44 starters.
With its 15th victory in 18 starts at the Dakar Rally, Kamaz’s factory team – Kamaz Master in the truck category – practically dominated it to the fullest, and this domination has continued since the beginning of this century.
It all started with Vladimir Chagin’s victory under the pyramids in Cairo in 2000.
Since then, the Russian brand’s winning streak has been broken only three times: in 2007, 2012 and 2016.
Although in the meantime Chagin, even nicknamed “Crem” after his record seventh triumph, ended his career, but he has worthy young successors.
Eduard Nikolaev scored his first victory in 2013, before he turned 30, as did his teammate Ayrat Mardiyev in 2015.
Finally, it is worth tracing Eduard Nikolaev’s already impressive achievements in the Dakar Rally so far:
- 2017 – first place and four stage wins;
- 2016 – seventh place and three stage wins;
- 2015 – second place and six stage wins;
- 2014 – third place and one stage victory;
- 2013 – first place;
- 2012 – exclusion after the fifth stage;
- 2011 – third place;
- 2010 – first place (Chagin mechanic);
- 2009 – second place (Chagin mechanic);
- 2007 – second place (mechanic Mardeev);
- 2006 – eighteenth place (mechanic Reshetnikov).
