“Thing is huge.” Those are the words that I heard Tony Hawk (yes that Tony Hawk) utter as he walked up to MINI’s latest Dakar race car. The body is 100% new based on the new 2017 Countryman while the underlying chassis and drivetrain is an evolution of the Dakar challengers that have been so successful for MINI. We recently spent some time with the new Dakar bound MINI at the Countryman launch and came away pretty blown away. The scale combined with the ingenuity of the engineering and the intricacy design details were incredibly impressive. And in talking with US driver Bryce Menzies it would seem that the Xraid MINI team has all the right mix of talent, team experience and youthful enthusiasm to make another run at an overall win.

But enough of that. Here are a bunch of hands-on photos from MINI’s latest Dakar entry.