Guerlain Chicherit partners with Prodrive for the 2023 and 2024 Dakar

After a notable return to the Dakar in 2022 with a buggy of its own design, Guerlain Chicherit and GCK Motorsport want to move up a gear. The intrepid French driver and entrepreneur has signed an agreement with the English team Prodrive to enter a Hunter T1+ on the Dakar 2023 and 2024, as well as on all rounds of the World Rally Raid Championship (W2RC). ) 2023.

The Savoyard and his co-driver Alex Winocq will compete in the events aboard the same model which allowed Sébastien Loeb and Fabian Lurquin to finish second in the 2022 Dakar and be in the running for the world title this fall.

This decision to switch to a customer car stems from the lessons of the 2022 Dakar, marked by a strong inequity between four-wheel drive vehicles (Prodrive, Toyota) and two-wheel drive (GCK, Century).

“I was very happy to return to the Dakar at the start of the year, declares Guerlain Chicherit. Unfortunately, we were able to realize the regulatory handicap given to two-wheel drive cars like our GCK Thunder. We therefore chose to use all-wheel drive.

Even if the race promises to be tough with around ten crews able to fight for victory, I have the hope that we can play at the front, especially as the course promises to be difficult with a lot of sand, a terrain which I particularly like and on which I hope to be able to make a difference. » The Dakar 2023 will take place from December 31, 2022 to January 15, 2023 over nearly 5000 km of special stages in Saudi Arabia.

This announcement does not put an end to the hydrogen program of GCK, quite the contrary. Throughout this program, GCK Motorsport engineers and technicians will remain in constant contact with those from Prodrive, in order to learn and collect data which will later be valuable within the framework of the GCK H2 program, the ambition of which – in the long term – is none other than winning the Rally Dakar with a hydrogen-powered vehicle.

“Regardless of the result, this program with Prodrive will be beneficial for GCK Motorsport because it fits into the learning and confidence-building curve that the team needs to perform in the future with its hydrogen car. »

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