“We were the first Lithuanians to win a Dakar stage in a truck”

Vaidotas Paskevicius and his crew made history at the 2022 Dakar by being the first from Lithuania to take part in the truck class. They made their debut with the support of Tomas Vratny’s Fesh Fesh team, who also provided them with a tried-and-tested Tatra Jamal. Powered by a 13-litre Renault engine, the Czech-made juggernaut had already completed the Dakar seven times and while obviously solid, isn’t exactly at the cutting edge of race truck technology. Vaidotas was optimistically hoping to do get into the top 15 -but that was before he realized quite how hard the race actually was! In the end the 36-year-old multiply Lithuanian off-road champion and his crew got up to a highly respectable 10th place before losing 2 places right at the end to finish 12th! Bitten by the bug the team were back in 2023 but were plagued by technical problems for much of the rally. But they still had a couple of reasons to be cheerful…

V P: “We had problems with the engine, problems with the injectors and it meant that for most of the time we only had about 65% power. However there were two things we were really pleased about. Firstly, we managed to get through the big dunes of the marathon stage. Secondly, our navigator did a fantastic job on the very last special, where there were a lot of tricky waypoints, and we managed to win the stage by 7 seconds! That’s the first time a Lithuanian truck has won a Dakar stage. When I study the route for 2024 it looks like it is going to be even harder than 2023. But that could be good for us. Since last year we found every problem on the truck and fixed it. Normally our truck is not the fastest but very solid, so maybe we can make a good result.”