As the survivors are busy thundering through today's eighth stage of the Silk Way Rally which is taking the toughness associated with the Dakar Rally on a new route through Russia, Kazahstan and Turkmenistan, Gerard de Rooy is lying an impressive second overall in Team de Rooy's brand-new Iveco Trakker. The new rally is part of the A.S.O. Dakar series and is taking place over 4,500 km, crossing Kazakhstan, and it will finish on Sunday September 13 at Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, close to the Iranian border.

At the end of the sixth stage, a 514 km trek from Janaozen to Turkmenbashi yesterday, Gerard de Rooy was just 35 minutes and 2 seconds behind the leading Kamaz driven by rally-raid truck star Firdaus Kabirov. In fact for their "home" rally Kamaz has turned up with no less than eight factory entries, and as well as multiple Dakar winner Kabirov, another Dakar multiple winner Vladimir Chagin is currently sitting in sixth place. Further top competitors in the truck category are the Czech teams Loprais (Tatra), Macik (Liaz) and Spacil (Liaz).

Team de Rooy built up a brand new Iveco rally Trakker for this event with engines supplied by Iveco Schouten, and after intensive pre-event testing in Morocco and France, Gerard de Rooy took to the start ramp of the inaugural Silk Way Rally, which got underway last Saturday in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan (Russia). Gerard de Rooy is being well supported by his father, Dakar legend Jan de Rooy, who is taking part at the wheel of the Iveco Trakker with which he won the legendary African race last year. De Rooy senior is currently in a very strong eighth place, 3 hours, 20 minutes and 30 seconds behind the rally leader with 17 trucks remaining in the rally as of today.

It was actually the President of Turkménistan, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov who first had the idea of a race that would cross three fraternal countries to present to the entire world territories where the ancient civilisation lives along with modernity. Thanks to the media exposure of an international sporting event, the project of the integration of these three countries around this federative idea could indeed progress. On the occasion of his official visit to Ashkhabad, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, decided to bring his support. The Russian and Turkmen initiative was then welcomed with enthusiasm by Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan. And that was when the itinerary of the future rally was designed and the course was baptised: the Silk Way (“Ýüpek ýoly”).

The first edition of the Silk Way Rally has been devised to go straight to the heart of the founding principles of the Dakar, the idea is to offer extreme endurance challenge while discovering amazing landscapes. Between Kazan and Ashgabat, from the 5th to the 13th of September, the car and truck crews are battling it out during nine days of competition. Once today's itinerary is complete just two stages remain. Over this distance, the drivers and co-drivers have entered into a context where merely coping with the race becomes even more important than pure performance. Therefore, to test the crews as much as the vehicles, the Silk Way Rally can also be considered as an ideal preparation to the 2010 Dakar.