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Added on the 04/09/2019 22:05:44 - Copyright : Auto Moto EN
After a successful campaign in the 2018/19 FIA World Endurance Championship, Fernando Alonso and TOYOTA GAZOO Racing will join forces once again in the upcoming months for a series of tests with the Toyota Hilux, the car that is expected to compete in the next Dakar Rally.
Fernando Alonso completed a successful two-day training in the Toyota Hilux on September 2-3 in Szczecin, Poland covering 700 kilometres, including sections used by the recently-concluded Baja Poland. The training course featured a variety of sand tracks, hard and soft soil, and bumpy terrain developed by rally raid specialists and the team’s logistics partner, Overdrive Racing.Fernando will head to South Africa for a non-competitive outing in the Lichtenburg 400, fifth round of the South African Cross Country Series, on September 13-14. Originally scheduled to take place near Harrismith, the event moved to its new location due to unseasonably dry conditions which posed a fire risk.
After winning twice at Le Mans and proclaiming Endurance World Champion, the Asturian Toyota driver took the wheel of the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing Hilux Dakar for the first time in an exclusive test in the legendary Kalahari desert.Alonso carried out throughout 2019 an intense preparation program for the 2020 Dakar, his debut in the world's toughest rally.In his first Dakar, Fernando Alonso signed a remarkable performance, with the same pace as the favorites in most of the stages, being the fastest driver of TOYOTA GAZOO Racing in several stages and finishing the test among the top thirteen of the general classification .March 28, 2020 marks the first year of Fernando Alonso's first test at the wheel of the Toyota Hilux Dakar, which would ultimately become the start of the learning that led the Asturian Toyota driver to debut in the Dakar, the toughest rally in the world. Alonso carried out two exclusive days of testing in the mythical Kalahari desert to begin discovering the secrets of how to drive a rally-raid car.
All four TOYOTA GAZOO Racing crews completed the seventh stage of the 2020 Dakar Rally which saw crews take on a gruelling 546-kilometre special stage across varied terrain littered with sand dunes from Riyadh to Wadi Al Dawasir. Nasser Al-Attiyah and navigator Mathieu Baumel again set the fastest time for the team just 2min 12sec behind the stage winners, maintaining their second place in the overall rankings with a gap of ten minutes. While the stage started with small dunes, the crew’s initial charge was hamstrung by the fast tracks which favoured their two-wheel-drive competitors.
Fernando Alonso achieved his first-ever rally raid podium with TOYOTA GAZOO Racing after a solid performance at the 2019 Al Ula-Neom Cross-Country Rally in Saudi Arabia on November 5-9. In just their third rally raid competition together, Fernando and navigator, Marc Coma, took home the third-place trophy for the first time since the Spanish duo started their preparations towards the 2020 Dakar Rally just over two months ago.