Minardi is easiest known for their perennial adorable underdog Formula One team that didn’t attain a single podium but launched a lot of famed drivers to the grid, in conjunction with Fernando Alonso, Giancarlo Fisichella, Mark Webber, and Jarno Trulli. Lesser known are their a little bit extra a success pre-F1 era Formula 2 and F3000 entries.
On the other hand, one page of the team’s historical past that stays on the sphere of unknown is that Giancarlo Minardi, the team’s founder, also had an ambition to bring their single-seater abilities to Dakar, with a Minardi-designed truck getting into the rally-raid’s 1986 edition.
The team opted to make employ of a heavy-accountability industrial truck chassis made by Piacenza-primarily based Costruzioni Veicoli Speciali s.r.l, round 200kms faraway from Minardi’s sorrowful in Faenza, as the premise for their entry.
The chassis, CVS FM 2230, used to be already qualified of going off-boulevard, and had 4-wheel steerage. The team place it by a area of main weight-saving modifications, added a roll-cage, and a crane within the truck mattress which used to be meant to attend with wheel changes.
The truck, dubbed Eurafrica Truck, used to be painted luminous yellow to match Minardi’s single-seaters of the time, with the crew aloof of Gaudenzio Mantova, who used to be an F2 and F3 unheard of, Denis Biffi (co-driver), and Adriano Antolini (navigator).
While within the beginning very aggressive, working in a at ease podium inform, the truck by no plot carried out the bound, going up in flames on stage 7 (Tamanrasset – Agadez) due to the an electrical field (the crew were unharmed). Minardi later acknowledged that the truck’s electrical plan used to be likely improperly designed due to the the team’s inexperience with rally-raid equipment.
You’re going to be ready to test out some extra photos of the truck, in conjunction with its moderately original crane plan and the truck’s stays after the fire listed right here (Russian).
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