OREANDA-NEWS. April 09, 2012. Next week, on April 19, Astrakhan will start the Khagan’s Gold rally-raid which will open the first stage of truck races of the Russian championship. Naberezhnye Chelny’s KAMAZ-master team has confirmed its participation in the race, and its members are getting ready to start in full force.

Five KAMAZ crews headed by young drivers Ayrat Mardeev, Eduard Nikolaev, Andrey Karginov, Anton Shibalov will go to conquer the southern Russian steppes. For the first time as a pilot, Dmitry Sotnikov will take part in the rally. Dmitry said that he had got experience of driving a KAMAZ racing vehicle as far back as in December 2011 during a training trip to Morocco.

"We`re going to the championship mainly to train and test our vehicles, but not just to win. Navigators, mechanics, and pilots will fine-tune their work", say the guys, despite the fact that they win prizes in these competitions every year.

The first stage of the Russian championship will last four racing days; the route of the rally is laid across the steppes and sands of Astrakhan Oblast. For the first time in the history of Astrakhan rally-raids, the race will start at the center of Astrakhan on the city’s island where a bivouac will be located. The most part of the race will pass on the banks of the Volga where the pilots will have to encounter plenty of sand dunes, alkaline lands, and twisting roads requiring high skills to pass them.

In addition to Naberezhnye Chelny’s team, crews of the Belarusian MAZ-avtosport team and Yakov Mekhtiev’s team from Rostov driving MAN trucks will compete in the truck category.

The second stage of the truck championship will start in Ulyanovsk this summer, and the third stage will be the Moscow-Astrakhan section of the Silk Road rally raid.