I’ve always liked this rally-raid event. The only one held on snow, its wildly different than the rest of the either Baja or Cross-Country rally events put on by the FIA. No sand here…just brutal temps and deep drifts. It also rarely brings competitors from anywhere other than Russia and similar Eastern Euro countries. I do be Nasser has run the race once…but that’s about it. You aren’t seeing a lot of the top flight Middle Eastern or Western Euro competitors here. 2021 was no different. The event was won by the properly Russian Vladimir Vasilyev who is typically in the top ten or so of competitors in the Dakar or other major rally-raids but doesn’t truly compete for wins outside this event. The race was also subject to true winter conditions with a full on blizzard, zero visibility, and giant snowdrifts impeding the roads all being present on one of racing days.
In the end the top three finishers were all Russians. Not surprising. Vladimir’s BMW X3 is a top flight vehicle, not quite that of the current Mini’s run by XRaid but of the just prior generation of builds so it had plenty to hold off the Russian developed G-Force Protos of the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.
In the FIA top level of entries, there was one vehicle listed as a “Nissan”, that of the #204 of Sergey Uspenskiy listed as a Nissan NP300, while there were a few others in the Russian Championship Series running the same event but not in the FIA classes with the #601 Nissan NP300 and #611 Nissan Patrol. The #611 doesn’t appear to have even started the event while the #601 finished 9th of 35 Russian Championship entries. Uspenskiy shows as finishing 12th or last in the FIA class….but I don’t really count that vehicle anyway…I believe its a Nissan frame but has had a swap of some kind in the powerplant…so….we don’t really like them anyway….Regardless…some photos of the event are here and you can see why Uspenskiy didn’t finish so well.
