Nissan will enter a full works team in the Dakar rally next year, featuring multiple national champion Geniel de Villiers and four-time winner Ari Vatanen.
Nissan will enter a full works team in the Dakar rally next year, featuring multiple national champion Geniel de Villiers and four-time winner Ari Vatanen.
De Villiers left for Paris immediately after this weekend’s Tarkastad 400 to attend the international media conference announcing the involvement of Team Nissan in the 2003 Dakar Rally.
The former touring car ace will drive one of three Nissan Hardbody pick-ups developed and built in South Africa by Nissan SA Motorsport for the official global Team Nissan, and will be accompanied by French co-driver Pascal Maimon.
Glyn Hall, the team’s chief engineer, is a former participant in the national rallying championship. He designed and developed Nissan’s version of the Rally Raid Pickup over the past three years for Nissan South Africa.
For the 2003 Dakar, the Nissan Rally Raid Team will be made up of five crews, all entered in the Group Two super production cars category. The race will mark the first time that Nissan enters the event as a works team. Apart from De Villiers and Vatanen, Kenjiro Shinozuka (Japan) and Thierry Delli-Zotti (France) – the pair that finished third in this year’s race – Thierry de Lavergne (France) and Jacky Dubois (France) and Khalifa Sultan AL Mutawei (United Arab Emirates) will complete the team.
When the South African-designed Hardbody entry made its debut in the 2002 Dakar, it put in a strong performance, winning 30 per cent of the special stages and leading the event for four days.
De Villiers (pictured right) and Maimon will have an evolution of the pickup, fitted with independent rear suspension. It is the only one of the five Nissan vehicles in the race to have this feature.
The vehicle recently underwent 1 500 km of testing at Rietfontein in the Northern Cape. The dune conditions were virtually identical to those expected in the Telefonica-Dakar early next year and Hall – who is in charge of all technical aspects of Nissan’s Dakar campaign – was pleased with the team’s progress.
“We confirmed that we now have a cooling system capable of handling the hottest conditions and steepest dunes, and our locally-developed tyre inflation/deflation system worked well in its maiden outing,” said Hall.
The hardware to inflate or deflate the vehicle’s tyres from within the cabin was developed locally especially for the Hardbody, Nissan SA said.
“Our truck is capable of 185 km/h on hard surfaces, but if you haven’t got a system like this for the dunes you can forget about winning,” Hall said. “In the 2002 Dakar there was about 1 600 kilometres of desert sand, so it essential to be able to adjust tyre pressures on the move.”