Summarize

TreasuryONE Motorsport’s Hennie de Klerk and Juan Möhr will race the team’s Prep Shop-run Hilux in the full 2024 South African Rally Raid Championship starting at the Nkomazi 400 in Malelane over the 19-20 April weekend. The tiny privateer team has come up with a cunning plan to help develop its reliability following a tough Dakar outing in January. It hopes that its novel way of going about racing locally, will deliver Dakar rewards in the longer run.

“We will treat every South African Rally Raid Championship round as if it’s a stage of the Dakar,” Hennie de Klerk explains. “As we so painfully learned this year, there’s no tomorrow at the Dakar if you do not finish today. To that end, we will use our local races to develop our strategy to best deal with our future Dakar challenges. That means concentrating on endurance and reliability, rather than just speed.

“The TreasuryONE Hilux will be set up as if we’re heading out to start a Dakar stage for each South African round. Unlike our rivals, our fuel tanks will be full, and we will carry a full set of spares and parts. It also means that only Juan and I will work on the car at each half-hour service interval. Tjaart from the Prep Shop can supervise, but we must do all the work ourselves at the stops.

“It’s a rather different approach to how we go racing in the South African Rally Raid Championship this year, but we’re certainly looking forward to the challenge,” de Klerk concluded. “It’s great to get back up and racing again after the downs of Saudi Arabia in January. It will be an interesting season for sure, but all for very good reason. Can’t wait!”

Beyond its South African Rally Raid project, TreasuryONE Motorsport plans to race the Morocco Desert Challenge in 2025 before returning to Dakar for the 2026 edition.