Triumph for reliability

There's a new truck champion for the Dakar Rally: Hans Stacey has won the 29th rally with his MAN TGA race truck. With his co-drivers Charly Gotlib and Bernard der Kinderen the Dutchman arrived at the finishing line 03:10:52 hours ahead of the second-placed contestant. This great success is due to a consistently strong performance from both driver and engineering. Stacey won 5 of the 13 truck stages, and since the fifth day of the tour no-one had been able to push him out of first place. The second MAN TGA race truck – also from the Exact-MAN Team – was piloted by Philippe Jacquot (F). He achieved an excellent 6th place in the truck competition overall. The third vehicle of the Exact-MAN Team was driven by Franz Echter. Although the TGA 18.480 was employed as an assistance vehicle Echter achieved the 10th place.

MAN was the most common brand among the vehicles with 22 of them - and there were good reasons for this: the MAN trucks had the lowest failure rate of all manufacturers. No other manufacturer was able to demonstrate such reliability in coming through the toughest rally in the world. MAN-brand trucks have proved impressively over the more than 9000 kilometres from Lisbon (Portugal) to Dakar (Senegal) just how powerful and durable they are.

Beside the two MAN TGA race trucks a further 20 MAN all-wheelers in use as service vehicles were listed in the competition ratings. They were used by well-known teams such as Volkswagen, KTM and BMW x-raid, some of which have been relying on the robustness and dependability of MAN's all-wheel-drive vehicles for many years now.  

This year the assistance vehicle, which MAN had like last year sent on the Dakar Rally, was for the first time an MAN TGA 26.480 6x6 BB. In the evenings it proved to be a dependable assistant for service work on other MAN trucks.

 Press release