Hino’s Dakar Rally 2025 truck development is based on the Hino 600 Series 4×2 rigid, its medium-duty model that serves logistics businesses worldwide. In the context of the Dakar Rally, medium-duty trucks deliver excellent mobility but don’t have a real advantage over their heavy-duty trucks rivals in terms of absolute power. Against these odds, Hino has consistently braved this rally with its lightweight and agile medium-duty trucks since the Japanese company first entered the race. And these trucks have come to be known as the “Little Monsters” for the intense competition that they put up against their larger rival trucks that are powered by larger-displacement engines.
In the Dakar Rally 2025, the Hino Team Sugawara will take on its rivals with a truck without a racing hybrid system.
“The truck we will be entering in the 2025 rally is based on the truck that raced in the 2024 event and will come with upgrades including new piping routes around the engine, improved rigidity of parts, and strength enhancements to the automatic transmission’s clutch plates.
In addition, to ensure the thoroughness of our preventive maintenance, we have defined replacement cycles for transfers, suspensions and other components based on their expected usage conditions.
We will also be revamping our maintenance system to keep time consuming and labour intensive maintenance tasks from overlapping,” explained Teruhito Sugawara Team Director & Driver; Hino Team Sugawara (pictured).
Teruhito Sugawara is the second son of Yoshimasa Sugawara, the “Iron Man of Dakar.” He first joined the Dakar Rally team as a mechanic in 1998, and began navigating for his father the following year. During the same period, he built up his experience in races including off-road races in Japan and Rally Mongolia before racing a Hino 500 Series truck in the Pharaoh Rally (Egypt) in 2003, in which he finished with an overall championship in the Trucks category. Since 2005, he has been racing the Dakar Rally alongside his father as a father and son duo on two trucks, and won his first class championship in the Under 10-litre Class in 2007. In 2021, he won his twelfth consecutive championship in the class. His father Yoshimasa Sugawara announced his retirement from the Dakar Rally after 2019 event, and Teruhito Sugawara has taken up his position as team director.
