The crews of the KAMAZ-master team swept the podium in the 2022 Dakar race. This is already the 19th victory of the Russian team in the toughest international rally.
This year saw the 44th edition of the Dakar Rally, which included 12 stages. The length of the route was 8,375 kilometers, of which 4,258 kilometers were special stages.
If we go back to the first days of January and follow the course of this year's race, we can safely call its outcome a confident victory of the KAMAZ-master team. There was no place for a happy occasion, from the very beginning it was a triumph of the KAMAZ racers’ highest professionalism in alliance with the reliability of KAMAZ trucks. The crews of KAMAZ-master from the very first days took the leading positions and made every effort not to let competitors in the TOP-3 in the overall standings of the race.
There were twelve victorious stages of KAMAZ-master out of all twelve stages of the most difficult rally on the planet. As a result, in the general classification, four crews of the KAMAZ-master team took the first four lines of the standings.
By the start of the penultimate stage, the KAMAZ-master crews had created a comfortable advantage over their competitors and eliminated the risks in the race on the final days – reliable passing, and not chasing the result at any cost, came to the fore. By the end of the race, the main question was who of the KAMAZ representatives would become the winner. In the general classification, the struggle for the Golden Bedouin trophy seriously escalated. After the penultimate eleventh stage, the leaders of the standings Dmitry Sotnikov and Eduard Nikolaev were separated by only 8 minutes. But, despite the victory at the penultimate stage of the race, Eduard Nikolaev did not manage to close the gap and get ahead of Dmitry Sotnikov.
By way of reminder, this year two out of four KAMAZ-master crews drove KAMAZ-435091 trucks of the latest generation K5. In 2021, they created a sports version of the KAMAZ-54901 long-haul tractor, which a year earlier had been commercialized and already gained confidence and popularity among Russian customers. The fact that Dmitry Sotnikov and Eduard Nikolaev, who were driving exactly the K5 generation trucks, became the leaders of the race, speaks for itself.
This year's race served to demonstrate another aspect. It has not passed without a case, which proves that in difficult situations KAMAZ-master acts primarily as a team. At one of the last stages, Eduard Nikolaev, only 10 minutes behind Dmitry Sotnikov in the general classification, could not stop, letting the crews of Andrey Karginov and Anton Shibalov following behind haul out Sotnikov's crew, which had got stuck. But Nikolaev helped Sotnikov. The KAMAZ-master crews put team interests ahead of personal ones.
Today, overnight Sunday into Monday morning, the KAMAZ-master team is returning home. Traditionally, at the Begishevo airport, the drivers will be met by the leaders and representatives of KAMAZ, the administration of the city of Naberezhnye Chelny, friends, family and relatives, as well as ordinary motor racing enthusiasts and fans of the team.