By: IOL Motoring Staff
Upington - With less than six weeks to go before the start of the 2016 Dakar Rally, Toyota has wrapped up its test programme on the all-new Hilux racing bakkies with a marathon session in the Northern Cape.
Officially the purpose was to sign off on a number suspensions set-ups and smaller details; in reality, Giniel de Villiers and Leeroy Poulter put the Hilux through lap after lap of the challenging test route, with De Villiers' navigator Dirk von Zitzewitz in the hot seat as well, learning his way around his new 'office' at full tilt boogie.
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They did hundreds of kilometres at race pace in temperatures of up to 40 degrees, over a mix of fast, flat sections, rocky jumps and soft, sandy dunes - just like the real thing.
The cars have proved their toughness, says Toyota Gazoo Racing SA team principal Glyn Hall.
“Our test session north of Upington was a great success but, by their very nature, racing cars are never really finished,” he said. “We'll keep working and refining things until the flag drops for the start of Stage One”.
Now the team has to pack the three cars, hundreds of spare parts and tons of equipment by 8 December for shipping to South America. When they arrive in Argentina on 28 December they'll barely have time to re-assemble the bakkies for one last test session before moving to Buenos Aires for the start on 2 January.
The three Gazoo Racing SA Hiluxes are the official Toyota factory entries for the 2016 Dakar, but there are another 39 Toyotas entered in the car category - most of them Hiluxes developed and built by Hallspeed.