Dakar Rally organizers, A.S.O, have announced an overview of the 2018 event. This upcoming race will be a commemorative milestone in the rally's history―the 40th event since its inauguration and the 10th to be held in South America.

For the first time in five years since 2013, Peru will be hosting Dakar Rally 2018, A.S.O announced. The event will take contestants through three countries: Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Kicking off in Lima, the capital city of Peru, the race will take the teams southward in the Andes towards Bolivia, and skirt the shores of Lake Titicaca before the rest day at La Paz, the capital city of Bolivia at an elevation of 3600m. Contestants will then traverse Bolivia from north to south, eventually reaching the finish line at Cordoba, the second largest city in Argentina. The entire rally will be made up of a total of 14 stages. What stands out for this race is that it will involve two loop course stages (where the start and finish lines are set up at the same bivouac), and a marathon stage (where crews race two stages back to back with no support from assistance vehicles at the intervening bivouac). The entire course will feature the diverse terrains of these three countries, meeting teams with high altitudes and dunes, and is expected to be another extremely grueling rally.

Dakar Rally 2018 overview

Route

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“Dakar Rally World Tour in TOKYO 2017” is held in Tokyo

After touring Spain, Holland, Italy, and China, the “Dakar Rally World Tour” arrived in Tokyo on Saturday, April 22, where A.S.O representatives were present to give an overview of Dakar Rally 2018. A talk show was held at the event that featured appearances by Japanese individuals with deep ties with the Dakar Rally―father and son driver team Yoshimasa Sugawara (director of HINO TEAM SUGAWARA) and Teruhito Sugawara, as well as Shinji Kazama, who was the first Japanese to enter the Dakar Rally. Shinnosuke, son of Kazama, who entered the Dakar Rally for the first time this year also joined the talk show via a video call and exchanged comments with his father. Yoshimasa Sugawara commented on the magnetism of the Dakar Rally saying, “I go into every race committed to do better than the last one, but things have a way of not turning out the way I plan. So the appeal of this rally is that there is no end to it.” Commenting on entering this rally with his father, Teruhito Sugawara remarked, “I started out in this race as the navigator of a car that my father was driving. Although it escaped me at the time, once our team started entering two trucks in the race and I began driving one of them, I realized the great responsibility that I had and the great work that my father was doing.”