Vaidotas Zala making Truck debut at 2025 Dakar Rally

After nine Dakar Rallies in a car, Vaidotas Žala will try his hand at the big boys in 2025 when he makes his debut in a truck. He will race an IVECO PowerStar fielded by Team de Rooy with sponsorship from Skuba.

“New to the team is Vaidotas Žala, he is a well known Lithuanian rally and rally raid pilot who will try his luck in the truck category,” reads a statement from Team de Rooy. “During testing, Vaidotas has proven to be a great pilot and instantly got the right feeling for the rally truck. He impressed us with his driving skills and techniques.”

Žala most recently raced the Dakar in a Mini John Cooper Works Rally Plus, with which he placed fifty-second in the Ultimate class. He was the category’s last finisher after an up-and-down race in which he finished as high as second but was set back by a myriad of mechanical problems like a pothole destroying the hydraulic jack system, an engine failure, and the alternator cable detaching and causing the battery to lose power.

The Mini T1+ was the fifth different vehicle that he raced Dakar with. He made his début in 2016 in a SEAT Leon before switching to a Toyota Hilux Overdrive in 2018, a standard Mini JCW Rally in 2020, and the Prodrive Hunter in 2023. His best finish was an eleventh at the 2022 race.

Since Dakar, he has mainly focused on the Lithuanian Rally Championship in a Škoda Fabia RS Rally2. Nevertheless, he continued to dabble in various cross-country rallies such as the BP Ultimate Rally-Raid in Portugal in April, where he retired after a crew member inadvertently used contaminated fuel to refuel his Mini.

Given his odd streak of vehicle problems, the Lithuanian certainly hopes things go better in a truck. He chose a good organisation to work with as well as Team de Rooy is a four-time Dakar champion.

There will obviously be a learning curve going from a car to truck. After all, a Mini is not exactly producing over a thousand horsepower with tyres that weigh over 135 kilograms nor does it require a second passenger as a mechanic.

“The test certainly surprised me,” he told 15min. “I feel like I can be fast because there are quite a few similarities with driving a car, but there are also some truly major differences. It’s a massive machine—nine tonnes, whereas cars are four times lighter. The minimum weight for a truck can be 8.5 tonnes, but when fully equipped, it approaches ten tonnes. One of the key differences for me as a driver is working the steering wheel. Driving fast in a truck is definitely not the same as driving fast in a car.”

Having said that, he also stressed he is “not going to Dakar with a truck just to be tourists or to check off a box in our CV that we competed in this category. Our goal is to go fast.”

Team de Rooy, winner of the 2023 Dakar and World Rally-Raid Championship with Janus van Kasteren, will field two more trucks for Aleš Loprais and the returning Anja Van Loon. Loprais announced his partnership with the team two weeks prior, moving over from Praga, while Van Loon finished twelfth in Truck at the latest Dakar as part of an all-woman crew.

The 2025 Dakar Rally will take place on 3–17 January.