Day 3 of the Dakar Rally 2022. The team is getting up to speed hitting a 9e place on the rally stage today and 12e place overall in Truck class. This is top sport and if your not on top of the game your losing time.
Team Dakar Speed is a amateur team as they build the truck them selves were all other top teams have factory support or a large teams of professionals work all year on the rally trucks.
So what is the difference? For the most parts time spend on running the rally trucks and maintaining them. The professional teams knowing all systems having the routine and this is not possible with a amateur team so how can you make this work the best?
The key is keep it simple. I’m a professional engine builder and with a bit more time spend I can up engine performance and this can complicate things as more monitoring is needed for example. The team dos not have a expert on reading engine data and there focus should be get the truck ready for the next day best possible so key is to find the balance between performance and engine parts used where less is more. The good things is the Scania XPI is a very good and efficient engine and as for this year there are upgrades to the fuel system planed for truck racing and if we have this data we can implement these on the rally engines as well but as always we need to test them and for this rally truck build the coolers could be the limiting factor. We still could go up in coolant temp even up to 110 degrees C but than coolant pressure should be monitored a lot more as this shows coolant flow or coolant flow drop due to pump cavitation.
Some impression on what this rally is.