MINI DOES DAKAR

Team seeks to regain crown it lost in 2016

FORMER WORLD RALLY Championship driver Mikko Hirvonen (right) leads a group of cross-country racing specialists aboard the newly developed Mini John Cooper Works Rally car in a bid to secure this year’s Dakar Rally title. THE PAIRS ABOARD the new Mini John Cooper Works Rally cars have started pursuing the championship title in the 39th edition of the Dakar Rally, which took off on Jan. 2 in Asuncion, Paraguay.

Team Mini, which this year enlisted X-raid in preparing the rally cars, won four straight Dakar Rally championships between 2012 and 2015. Composing the team for the 2017 campaign are former World Rally Championship driver Mikko Hirvonen with co-driver Michel Perin in car number 303, Yazeed Al-Rajhi and Timo Gott- schalk in car number 306, and Orlando Terranova and Andreas Schulz in car number 308.

Five other race teams using Mini rally cars are also competing in Dakar this year — Jakub Przygonski and Tom Colsoul, Boris Garafulic and Filipe Palmeiro, Mohamed Abu Issa and Xavier Panseri, Stephan Schott and Paulo Fiuza, and Sylvio de Barros and Rafael Capoani.

Despite the number of competitors aboard Mini rally cars, Mr. Hirvonen remained cautious about the team’s chances of taking the Dakar championship this year — and even if most of the drivers are considered “crosscountry specialists.”

“Nothing still beats the experience [ gained] from the Dakar itself, so we need to be humble and concentrate really hard each day,” he said.

The Dakar Rally (formerly called the Paris-Dakar Rally because it used to be run from Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal), from its first edition in 1978 has been considered as the most grueling race in the international motor sports calendar. In 2017, 316 cars, motorcycles, quad bikes and trucks are taking on 12 stages spread over as many days, totaling to more than 9,000 kilometers over varied terrain. From Asuncion, the route this year crosses into Bolivia and finishes on Jan. 14 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.