(from topgear.com)
Trucks, by their nature, are generally rather large, quite useful for carrying things and as slow as waiting for a YouTuber to get to the point.
But then an unofficial race within a race kicked off: who’d be first to set up camp at that day’s bivouac? After all, you’re not going to be a support driver for a rally raid without some kind of affinity towards racing, so if the opportunity to blast across the empty desert presents itself – and your mates are in similar trucks – who isn’t going to give into temptation?
Thus the Truck category was born. If anyone could be considered its creator, it’d be Jan de Rooy, who started experimenting with the truck layout in the 1980s, resulting in a 10-tonne, twin-engined, 1200bhp DAF – with a total engine displacement of 23.2 litres and a top speed that outdid Ari Vatanen’s rally car. Holy moly.
Even now, the sheer numbers – and the spectacle – are every bit as staggering as they were in the late Eighties. But, being an FIA-certified category, even this level of lunacy is classified and shoehorned into a rulebook.
T5 is for all trucks, with decimal-pointed suffixes nailing down the detail – T5.1 for series production, T5.2 for modified and T5.3 for support trucks that are allowed on the rally route itself. Oh, and the bigger support trucks that actually perform the original truck role – supporting the racers from the bivouac – are technically classed as T6, but they take easier routes to each day’s destination to set up camp and put the kettle on. Bet they still have their own, unregulated competition though…
