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SILVER Star
Congrats to Toyota Auto Body, Team LandCruiser, and Toyo Tires for winning Dakar for the 9th consecutive time! This will be the last year using the 200-series platform.
They finished #1 & 2 in their series of the Production Car Class, 51st and 52nd overall.
Akira Miura drove the #242 car with Laurent Lichtleuchter navigating, and Ronald Basso and Jean-Michel Polato in #245.
Personally I'm interested in the tech of this vehicle, as it is impressive what stays stock, but realistically they do have to modify some things for safety and to actually finish such a long high-speed rally.
Quick look..
Drivetrain: 4.5L turbodiesel 1VD, 6spd auto, "full time" 4wd. I assume they have lockers of some type, but haven't seen anything definitive.
Suspension: no KDSS, two dampers per corner, appears very high spring rate as you'd imagine for the rally nature. RTI score is probably abysmal.
Wheel/tire: Enkei Forged PDM1 - 17x7.5, LT285/70R17 Toyo Open Country M/T-R (I would love a set of these wheels but they aren't listed on the Enkei US website, and being forged I'd imagine they are $$$$)
Recovery: moved front hooks to frame-level. This could be a regulation change, but also would be easier to access if the front is buried in a dip.
Protection: no sliders, stock bumpers, significant skid plates and trick plastic panels attached to rear LCAs to keep flying rocks out of the rear suspension.
Lighting: single removable light bar above the grille. (Are there any night stages in dakar rally?)
Any other details people dig up, please post. For now here are some of the videos they put out.. and note that the youtube auto translation captioning from Japanese to English is comical..
Some of the team, and some good close-up shots of the vehicle and parts. Note that they are working on a manual transmission in part of this.. I was thinking maybe it was a prop but you can hear clear audio of a manual shift pattern at one point. The car has been manual in the past but not for a few years at least, and the terrible subtitles mention it being the third year of the automatic car.. so maybe they were comparing times and performance?
They also have the usual social media pages..
