A great success was achieved by the Turkmen racers at the recent stage of the Rally-raid World Cup - Rally Kazakhstan 2019, which was held off-road. Pilot Shamyrat Gurbanov, together with his son and navigator Muhammetmyrat Gurbanov, took second place in the T-2 category, where the race is conducted on SUVs with a gasoline engine, the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported.
In the competition, which became the third in a row, 28 crews from Turkmenistan, Russia, Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, Poland, China, Qatar and other countries took part. The racers covered more than two and a half thousand kilometers of sandy and mountainous areas of Aktau, as well as the protected and at the same time resort area of Kenderli.
The distance was divided into six stages, the most difficult of which for Turkmenistan was the second, where there was a problem with the tank, which took them several hours. But later they practically managed to catch up, as evidenced by their finish in second place in their class. In the overall standings, our compatriots took 14th place.
For Shamyrat, the representative of the Autosport Federation of Turkmenistan, this is not the first success on the international sports arena. So, in 2011, on the Silk Road rally-raid, which stretched from Moscow to Sochi for more than 4000 kilometers, pilot Shamyrat Gurbanov with navigator Aziz Musayev took third place in the T-2 class. The following year, with the navigator Serdar Mulymyradov, he became a silver medalist on the Moscow – Gelendzhik highway in the same discipline. Our compatriots gave way only to another Turkmen duet of racing drivers - Gurbanberdy Danatarov and Rafael Gainullin, who became gold medalists.
Currently, an invitation from the International Federation of Motor Sports (FIA) has come to the address of the Motorsport Federation of Turkmenistan, where our race drivers are invited to take part in the Silk Road-2019 rally-raid to be held next month. It starts in Russia, then continues along the steppes of Mongolia and finishes in China.
