MAZ-SPORTauto has not been allowed to race the Dakar Rally since 2022 due to European Union sanctions on their parent company. While the likelihood of them being lifted anytime soon is low, team boss Siarhei Viazovich said they still operate as if Dakar is on the calendar in case the sanctions go away.

“It’s unlikely I’ll win the Dakar personally, but it’s important to keep the team at the required level necessary for as long as until the sanctions are lifted,” Viazovich told Itogi Nedeli. “This is our motivation, to prove to the whole world that no matter what obstacles you build, MAZ will win this race. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Siarhei Viazovich (who wins).”

Unlike longtime truck rival KAMAZ-master, MAZ was locked out of Dakar and other international rally raids before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. MAZ’s parent company, the state-owned Minsk Automobile Plant, was sanctioned by the EU in June 2021 after cracking down on employees who protested against the 2020 Belarusian presidential election. The protests, in response to an election widely deemed rigged to help longtime president Alexander Lukashenko, were crushed after nearly a year with widespread cases of mass arrests and torture along with some deaths. Perhaps to be expected given their employer, Viazovich and other active team members supported the government suppression despite the violence that ensued.

As part of the sanctions, MAZ’s subsidiaries like the team are unable to operate in EU countries; while the Dakar Rally is held in Saudi Arabia, the ASO is French and teams have to head to western Europe (currently Spain) to ship their vehicles to the race. MAZ tried to get around the restriction for the 2022 Dakar by signing up under the Belarusian Automobile Federation’s name since the BAF is an FIA member, but French customs intercepted them and told them to turn back. The team also considered heading to Saudi Arabia via Syria, then a friendly country under Assad, but decided against it.

Viazovich noted the entry fee, which was paid by the BAF, was never returned since the ASO fears it would be wired to MAZ. Thus, the organizers will only send it back if sanctions are lifted.

“The fees remain on the other side for now, but the issue is pretty straightforward,” he explained. “As soon as we arrive at the race, those fees will be considered paid. The money hasn’t been physically returned, but as soon as we show up, this fee will be counted. How soon this will happen—if I knew, I’d be making completely different plans for the team’s preparations right now. We just don’t know. We hope common sense will finally prevail among people and everything will return to normal.

“The problem is that the Minsk Automobile Plant is under sanction, and it is currently impossible to compete in a MAZ vehicle according to the documents we received. For us, this is our biggest obstacle and a matter of principle.”

In the meantime, the team is focused on the Russian Rally-Raid Championship where they remain KAMAZ’s main adversary. Viazovich won the series’ premier Silk Way Rally in 2023, marking just the second time in the race’s history that a KAMAZ did not win the Truck class. While the Silk Way has been mainly filled with Russian and Belarusian competitors since the full-scale invasion, Viazovich opined the level of competition for trucks there is higher than at Dakar since “at the start of the Silk Way, there are more than ten winners or podium finishers from Dakar.”

Featured image credit: MAZ-SPORTauto