BETWEEN mediocre local sporting achievements and domestic politics increasingly dominated by a costly combination of radical populism, entitlement and government centralism, most South Africans had little to cheer about in 2011.

And the news from farther afield was hardly encouraging either: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drawing slowly to a bloody conclusion while global economic travails worsened as some euro countries melted down, unable to get their citizens off a high public-spending diet.

Yet, there's one sporting event that should make South Africans proud, whatever the final result. It's one of the toughest, most demanding of all. And it's one where South African involvement goes beyond the headlines.

The Dakar Rally, which wends its way over the Andes from the Atlantic to the Pacific - from Mar del Plata in Argentina via Chile, ending in Lima in Peru two weeks and 8400km later - is more than the clichéd test of man and machine. It goes from sea-level to over 4800m, starving engines and crew of air, over rocky terrain to sand dunes, heat to freezing cold, dust to mud, rain to sand storms.

Toyota SA Motorsport has built and entered two cars for 2009 Dakar winner Giniel de Villiers and four-time SA off-road champion Duncan Vos. At the time of starting yesterday's stage, De Villiers was ninth overall on his 10th Dakar. Vos was in 12th spot as he steadily wound up his pace on his first attempt, playing the tortoise to the hares in front.

Both the superfit Vos, 50, and De Villiers, 39, will rely on maturity over impetuousness.

Both honed their skills on race - not rally - tracks, starting their driving careers in home-built saloon-cars, via single-seater formula cars in Vos's case, before gaining works' touring car drives in the 1990s, where they scored a number of one-two championship finishes. Not only were they teammates, but a common link was forged in Glyn Hall, then the team principal for Nissan and today for Toyota.

Hall, himself a SA rally champion in the 1980s, emigrated from the UK in the late '70s, hooking up immediately with and learning his trade from the Chev Dealer Team under Geoff Mortimer, perhaps the most successful professional driver-engineer SA has produced. Hall branched out on his own in the '90s, moving into rallying as the track touring car series wound up, winning his team's first off-road championship with De Villiers behind the wheel in 2001.

Then, as now, the cars prepared in Hall's Midrand premises quickly acquired an international reputation, the SA-based team soon tasked with preparing cars for Nissan's Dakar ambitions, driven both by De Villiers and former world rally champion Colin McRae.

Amid all the PR- and politician-generated hype about being proudly South African, today's Toyota bakkies are just that, prepared by boytjies in Gauteng with a large dose of boer-making-a-plan endeavour rather than the usual motorsport expediency of throwing money at problems.

While its sponsorship is generous by SA standards, it is a fraction of the budget of the European and US-based efforts.

But money is not everything. While the cars around the Toyotas today are mostly rally-raid specials, the SA duo are using many production parts, including the near-standard V8 engines, in their bakkies.

The front suspension, for example, is adapted from an SUV, yet capable of soaking up man-sized boulders and bone-shaking jumps and knocks. A case of braaivleis, biltong, sunny skies and inventiveness.

In an age where some made a career out of playing victim and milking the proceeds, it is encouraging to see others with an old-fashioned "can-do" mentality, getting out there against the odds and shaping their own fortunes. Wherever they finish on January 14, this is a team that should make SA proud.