OREANDA-NEWS. September 16, 2010. The Silk Way 2010 off-road rally raid of the Dakar series with participation of almost all members of the KAMAZ-master team will start in Saint-Petersburg on 11 September.

KAMAZ’s sports team which had celebrated its 22nd anniversary this summer sent its 7 crews on KAMAZ racing vehicles to participate in the second edition of Silk Way. The first 3 vehicles will be driven by eminent racing drivers of our time and repeated Dakar prize-winners – pilots Vladimir Chaguin, Firdaus Kabirov and Ilghizar Mardeev. Another 3 crews are headed by young, but already experienced pilots – Eduard Nikolaev, Ayrat Mardeev, Andrey Karghinov. They participated in the first edition of Silk Way which was held in September 2009 along the route Kazan – Ashgabat. Andrey Leontiev, the representative of the information partner of the team, a participant of the Khazar Steppes 2010 race, the head of the Auto Plus TV-channel will drive as a captain in the seventh crew.

The second edition of the Silk Way international rally will link the northern capital of Russia to the capital of the future Olympiad-2014 – the city of Sochi. AK Transneft became a title sponsor of the Silk Way 2010 – Dakar Series rally. The organizers of the race suppose that the following rallies along ancient caravan routes will also finish in Sochi – right up to holding of the winter Olympic Games of 2014. The total length of the route will this time be 4,200 kilometers 2,500 km of which are special stages with account of travel time.

The marathon competition which professional racers not without reason named “half of Dakar” will cross three climatic zones of the European part of Russia. The route developed by the international reconnaissance group of the Dakar rally raid this summer promises to be more complicated and interesting than last year when the racers crossed the Kara-Kum desert and came in Turkmenistan. Bivouacs after the passed stages – and there will be eight bivouacs in all – will be located near to the cities Staraya Russa, Vyazma, Lipetsk, Volgograd, Astrakhan, Elista and Maykop.

Already on the first stages, the racers will have to completely bring into play off-road properties of their vehicles. High-speed stages of the rally will be to the south after Lipetsk, near Volgograd and Astrakhan. A real Russian desert without roads and settlements starts in the sands of Kalmykia. The race will finish in the subtropics of Black Sea Region, on the venues of Sochi, on 18 September.

This time Silk Way also attracted attention of the European best automobile companies. The racers representing these companies are the main competitors of the KAMAZ-master team on all off-road rally raids. At this race, many of them, like the KAMAZ racers, will test new models of sports vehicles which will participate in the next Dakar-2011.