pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/motorsports/" rel="tag"Motorsports/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/suvs/" rel="tag"SUVs/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/volkswagen/" rel="tag"Volkswagen/a/pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/1121370/"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/10/vwt2_dak.jpg" //abr / div align="center"emstrongsmallClick above for a high-res gallery of the Volkswagen Touareg 2 Race/small/strong/embr //div br /Volkswagen Motorsport is putting four factory-backed teams in next year's a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/11/2009-dakar-rally-to-be-held-in-argentina-and-chile/"'Dakar' Rally/a, which will actually be held in South America, and they'll all be driving the new Race Touareg 2. The a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/1121371/"insanely intricate spaceframe chassis/a vehicles are being built in Germany and will use will use a 2.5-liter TDI with 276 hp and. The 15-stage race is expected to be more grueling than usual because of the extreme changes in altitude and terrain, but perhaps it will give other teams a chance to break Mitsubishi's seven-year chokehold on the winner's dais. Volkswagen's best chance at victory could be with driver Carlos Sainz, the 1990 WRC champion, and navigator Michel Perlin, a three-time Dakar winning navigator. The last -- and only -- time VW won the Dakar Rally was in 1980, with the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Iltis"Volkswagen Iltis/a.br /br /div class="postgallery"pstrongGallery: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/"Volkswagen Race Touareg 2/a/strong/pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/1121370/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/10/241008-2--b-vw_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/1121371/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/10/241008-2-vw_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/volkswagen-race-touareg-2/1121369/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/10/241008-2--a-vw_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //a/divpa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/27/volkwagen-readying-touareg-2-for-2009-dakar/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emVolkwagen readying Touareg 2 for 2009 Dakar/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ffffcc;border:1px solid #ffff99;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com"img src="http://www.autoblog.com/media/feedlogo.gif" alt="Autoblog" style="float:left;padding:0 5px 5px 0;" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/27/volkwagen-readying-touareg-2-for-2009-dakar/"Volkwagen readying Touareg 2 for 2009 Dakar/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:58:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a.br style="clear:both;"/ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.newspress.co.uk/DAILY_LINKS/arc_oct_2008/241008-2-vw.htmRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/27/volkwagen-readying-touareg-2-for-2009-dakar/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1352231/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/27/volkwagen-readying-touareg-2-for-2009-dakar/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~a/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=uyTjZZ"img src="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~a/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=uyTjZZ" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=GKjTm"img src="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=GKjTm" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=2KtTm"img src="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=2KtTm" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.autoblog.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/433827531" height="1" width="1"/