It was a long eight months, but the Stadium Super Trucks are finally back for 2024. For the third year in a row, the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach will open the season as the California street circuit continues its run as the only track left from the inaugural season in 2013. Matt Brabham enters as the defending winner after sweeping both events in 2023. After spending that year primarily competing in Indy NXT and Trans-Am alongside SST, Brabham is now an IMSA driver. Myles Cheek hopes to avenge his heartbreak when Brabham passed him for the lead and win in Race #2 with two laps remaining. Se ..read more

Aleš Loprais and his team have started work on building a Tatra 815 Puma for the Dakar Classic, intended as a tribute to his uncle Karel Loprais. The project began in early April. Karel Loprais raced the Paris–Dakar Rally from 1986 to 2006, exclusively for Tatra as an employee for the company, with his first race in the Puma 4×4 truck (officially designated as T 815-2 R55-16) taking place in 1998. Already a three-time winner prior but coming off a retirement in the 1997 edition due to an engine failure, he hoped the Puma would be more reliable and his wishes were answered as he scored two stag ..read more

Neil Woolridge Motorsport will look to defend their South African Rally-Raid Championship in a new Ford Ranger T1+ sporting a redesigned front end. Reigning champion Gareth Woolridge and Boyd Dreyer will pilot the #200, on the heels of their Dakar Rally début, while brother Lance Woolridge and Kenny Gilbert are in the #234. Gareth entered the Dakar in January after winning the SARRC. His race was upended by a rollover in Stage #7 that knocked him out of the overall, though he was able to reach the finish; although he finished forty-first overall in the Ultimate class, he placed as high as seve ..read more

For the first time, the 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) is heading to Europe for the 6 Hours of Imola on 21 April. After an absolutely thrilling season opener at the Qatar 1812km, excitement is building for the first European race on the calendar. The Track Credit: Toyota Gazoo Racing Imola appears on the WEC calendar as a replacement for Monza, as the “Temple of Speed” is undergoing renovations in 2024. This is the first time the championship has headed to the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari and the first 6 Hours of Imola since the 2011 Le Mans Sports Series. The 4.9 ..read more

After retiring from the Dakar Rally in January, Hennie de Klerk and his TreasuryONE Motorsport team will be approaching the upcoming South African Rally-Raid Championship like it is a leg on the former. He and his co-driver Juan Möhr will have a full kit of spare parts and tools onboard their WCT Toyota Hilux, then perform repairs and changes themselves without the help of their team when they are at the service station. The team’s technician Tjaart van der Walt will be present to oversee the stops but not get involved. Under World Rally-Raid Championship rules, crews are not permitted to help ..read more

The late Ted Toleman is perhaps best known for kickstarting the Formula One careers of those like Ayrton Senna, Rory Byrne, and Pat Symonds via Toleman Motorsport. After selling the team to sponsor Benetton in 1986, Toleman decided to remain involved in racing, albeit in a slightly different discipline from what he was used to. In 1987, a year after his F1 exit, Toleman and company decided to enter the Paris–Dakar Rally. Although the race had only been active for a decade, it quickly grew into the world’s preeminent rally raid and still holds this reputation today. Toleman’s maiden start came ..read more

Tacita‘s newest line of electric bikes for 2024, particularly the Enduro, Motard, and Motorally models from the T-Race line, were developed using what they picked up from their Dakar Rally effort in January. The Italian bike manufacturer entered the Dakar Rally in the Mission 1000 class as Tacita Formula Corsa, fielding two Tacita Discanto bikes for Oscar Polli and Silvayn Espinasse. Polli, the 2008 FIM FIM Cross-Country Rallies World Champion (precursor to today’s World Rally-Raid Championship) and 2012 Africa Eco Race winner, failed to start the first stage and fell into an early hole in the ..read more

The newest addition to Red-Lined Motorsport‘s REVO line will make its début when the 2024 South African Rally-Raid Championship begins at this weekend’s Nkomazi 400 as Chris Visser and Dave Klaassen pilot the REVO+ GT-R. As the name suggests, it is a T1+ car that uses an engine pulled from the Nissan R35 GT-R. Nicknamed “Godzilla”, the GT-R is Nissan’s flagship sports car and has seen extensive action in GT and endurance racing. The GT-R’s 3.8-litre, twin-turbo V6 VR38DETT engine produces 421 kW of power (565 horsepower) with 632 Nm of torque. Ironically, the standard engine is too powerful fo ..read more

Bournezeau Rallye Aventure, also known as Team B.R.A. for short, will be pulling double duty in January 2025 as they plan to enter both the Dakar Rally and the Dakar Classic. Yannick Grèzes will race the former in a Drakart Scorpion while his son Tenessy Grèzes and Julien Bessé enter the latter with a Toyota Land Cruiser HDJ80 and Mitsubishi Pajero V6, respectively. Drakart is an American manufacturer that builds side-by-side vehicles for American desert racing like SCORE International and Best In The Desert, though their vehicles are also FIA compliant and thus eligible for Dakar. In 2017, th ..read more

The Dakar Rally will no longer have the Quad class in 2025 as the Amaury Sport Organisation places more focus on bikes, ending a sixteen-year run as an official category and nearly three-decade stretch with such a vehicle taking part. Needless to say, its riders are not too thrilled about having their livelihoods ripped away from them. ASO head David Castéra confirmed the category’s removal days before the start of the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid in Portugal, a round of the World Rally-Raid Championship like the Dakar, though rumours persisted long prior on the heels of just ten quads at Dakar in J ..read more