Toyota

On a cloud

Lucio Alvarez and Armand Monleon enjoyed an excellent 2021 aboard their Toyota Hilux Overdrive. Like their teammate Nasser Al Attiyah, they raced four of the six rounds that counted towards the World Cup for Cross-Country Rallies. And the Spanish speaking duo made a perfect start to their season by winning the Kazakhstan Rally. They didn’t race the third round but then got on the podium twice at the Rallye du Maroc and Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge. Fifth at the final round in Ha’il, the Argentinian from Mendoza drove his best season to date, finishing 2nd in the championship in Saudi Arabia behind the man from Qatar. All of which made him one of the drivers to watch for the 2022 Dakar that got under in the same country just a few weeks later. Initially at least, the first round of the new rally-raid world championship looked like it was going to go well for the Alvarez-Monleon pairing and they were running in the top 5 up until the start of stage 8 where they lost three hours with a broken differential. Enough to dash their hopes of featuring among the elite in Jeddah but not enough to stop them taking second place behind Carlos Sainz on the penultimate stage of the 2022 Dakar – their best performance last January ahead of their podium finish on stage 5. With a strong daily points score, they line up at the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in 6th place with the firm intention of picking up where they left off before their mechanical problems - especially as the 3rd round of the championship will be the one where everything came together last year in Kazakhstan…