After 18 days and over 8000 kms the Paris-Dakar
rally finally ended here in Sharm El Sheikh on the 19th January 2003. There
were 343 cars, trucks and motorbikes at the start in Marseille but for the
last leg of the race between Abu Rish and Sharm El Sheikh, there were only
189 vehicles left.
Mitsubishi
was the big winner in this race and took the first
top three spots in the car category. The Japanese
driver Hiroshi Masuoka and his German navigator
Andreas Schultz won the race. This was the second
year in a row that Masuoka wins the Paris-Dakar
rally. But the French driver Peterhansel was expected
to win this year. He ran into trouble after hitting
a rock only a short distance from Sharm El Sheikh.
And he lost his top spot to the Japanese after
being in the lead by over 20 minutes. Peterhansel
has previously won the race on motorcycle and
was hoping to become the second driver ever to
have won on both two and four wheels.
In
the motorcycle race, the famous KTM machines dominated
the top spots and the French driver Richard Sainct
won this category. Last but not least, there was
the monster truck class which saw Russian Kamaz
vehicles in the first and third spot. The winning
machine's team consisted of Vladimir Tchaguine,
Semion Yakoubov and Sergei Savostine. Enjoy some
action pictures from the Sinai desert and Sharm
El Sheikh below.
