Day 1: 6 Jan

Dakar Rally 2018, celebrating its 40th year, started off from Lima, Peru on Jan. 6, and took contestants on a 31 km SS en route to their first bivouac in Pisco. The Hino team has entered two HINO500 Series trucks in the trucks category. Both trucks delivered solid performance with Car 2 crewed by Teruhito Sugawara and Mitsugu Takahashi finishing 12th overall and 1st in the Under 10-litre Class, and Car 1 piloted by Yoshimasa Sugawara and Katsumi Hamura finishing 23rd overall and 2nd in its class. (Finishing positions are provisional as the results chart available as of this writing did not show class rankings).

This year's rally―which is the 10th event since its relocation to South America―will take contestants on a route that had not been travelled in the past, starting off in Peru, racing through Bolivia, and finishing in Argentina. While the first part of rally will be quite similar to that of the 2013 event, taking racers southwards after they start off in the Peruvian capital, Lima, on Jan. 6, the stage that takes teams from Arequipa, Peru to La Paz, the Bolivian capital will be completely new. Following the rest day at La Paz, the teams will be taken on a course that they raced on in the 2017 event traveling southward via Uyuni en route to Salta, Argentina. Contestants will then be confronted with challenging segments in the Andes foothills near Fiambala, and the last day will feature a looped SS that starts off and finishes at Cordoba where the final finish line will be set. Another characteristic of this year's event―which stretches over 15 days, 14 stages, and 8270 kilometers―is that the total distances of timed segments will be relatively long at 4162 kilometers (all mileages are for the trucks category).