Aprilia Racing project with Tuareg destined for Dakar
A curious announcement dropped into our inbox recently from Aprilia stating their aim to take the Tuareg 660 adventure bike platform racing with a return to the top rally raid competitions including Dakar.
What makes this particularly intriguing is that for some years now engine capacities in these events have been restricted to 450 cc engine, in a quest to keep speeds down.
Aprilia’s announcement perhaps hints that changes are afoot in World Rally Championship events to allow larger capacity machines back into these events.
This would of course make participation and the support of such events much more palatable to the motorcycle company beancounters and marketing teams. The current 450 cc machines are already racing under top speed controls which are GPS tracked and no doubt this would be how speeds would be kept down if the competition was to go back to higher capacity machines.
Aprilia have stated that the racing version of the new Aprilia Tuareg 660 will be developed by Aprilia Racing with technical input from GCorse (brother’s Gianfranco and Vittoriano Guareschi), who already worked on the Tuareg taking part in the Italian Motorally Championship over the course of 2022.
Involvement in the Tricolore Motorally will continue in 2023, a season that will be entirely focused on developing a project that has shown enormous potential right from the start. The starting line will feature two Tuareg 660s entrusted to Jacopo Cerutti and Francesco Montanari.
Cerutti, 34, who brings his own extensive experience to Aprilia Racing development: the rider from Como has multiple Italian Motorally wins to his name, as well as bringing home four Italian and one European Enduro titles and having participated in Dakar six times already. He will be backed by Francesco Montanari, a national-level Enduro rider who achieved a great rookie performance at the Tricolore Motorally last year.
Alongside Aprilia Racing’s Tuareg project, Aprilia will also be present at the venues of the 2023 Italian Motorally to provide support for all those riding a Tuareg 660 in the new GPX “entry level” category, which was specifically created to make the Championship more accessible.
The Aprilia Tuareg project will be overseen by Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola.
Massimo Rivola – Aprilia Racing CEO
“With its ‘Back to Africa’ project, Aprilia Racing is returning to the world of off-road racing, to the races that forged the division. We want to keep growing in the world of Grand Prix motorcycle racing and on-track races. We want to discover new talent through our SP 250 Championship and the RS 660 Trophy, but we are also embarking on a completely new project with the extraordinary Aprilia Tuareg. It’s an additional sign of development for a racing division that has grown significantly over the past years achieving results never before seen by Aprilia”.
Romano Albesiano – Aprilia Racing Technical Director
“We are picking up the baton from a history of great successes. Aprilia is the only Italian brand to have won a stage of the Dakar Rally and, in 2010, we took the last podium in the overall ranking. These are just the first steps in a completely new project, and the purpose of the 2023 season will be to start us on the path that will take us back to the great desert races. But one thing is certain: the bike will be forged from the values that have always marked Aprilia’s racing endeavours: innovation in the service of performance”.
After its first epic appearance in the Paris-Dakar with the Tuareg in 1989, Aprilia returned to the great desert race in 2010 with a revolutionary RXV Rally 450 twin that would participate in three consecutive editions of the Dakar from 2010 to 2012. The spectacular Rally immediately earned three stage victories and took third place overall in 2010, narrowly missing the glorious objective of a rookie triumph.
