The Porsche 911 Dakar celebrates a famous chapter in rally car history
In 1977, Frenchman Thierry Sabine got separated from his competitors in the Libyan desert on his Yamaha XT 500 motorbike during a section of the Abidjan-Nice rally. Alone for three days and nights with only a lucky amulet for company, he was eventually rescued, in bad shape, by the Algerian Air Force. The experience left its mark, and we’re not just talking tan lines. Sabine quickly decided he wanted to give other people the chance to get lost in the desert too, and the following year, in Paris, over 170 vehicles joined him at the start of the inaugural Paris-Dakar rally.
In its early years, tales of dilettante derringdo helped to put Sabine’s race on the map. In 1980, a team of four took on the unrelenting 10,000km course on Vespa scooters. Somehow two of them made it all the way to Senegal. A year later, a pair of Frenchmen entered an adapted Rolls-Royce Corniche for a lark, packing oysters and Champagne into its sizeable boot. The oysters ran out after three days but the Corniche improbably lasted the distance.
In 1982, the then Prime Minister’s son Mark Thatcher sparked an international incident when he and his Peugeot 504 went missing for six days in the Sahara. His mother Margaret personally settled the ensuing rescue bill, which, according to one official, included “the liberal dispensation of drinks to all and sundry after Mark Thatcher’s arrival at [the] hotel”.
Away from the playboys, the world’s best pro drivers were soon being drawn to the Dakar’s unique challenges: extreme heat, punishing distances, isolation, logistics, not to mention the technical requirements of handling a variety of road surfaces. If, that is, there were roads at all.
Belgian F1 driver and six-time Le Mans winner Jacky Ickx was one driver completely won over by the scale and setting: “In a race like the Dakar, you cannot cheat. You can encounter some extremely tough situations out there and that is when you find out what you are really made of. The landscape, the setting, cut you down to size. Africa opens your eyes.”
In 1983, Ickx won the car category in a trusty desert-ready 4x4 Mercedes G-Class. Ahead of the 1984 race, however, he went to Porsche with what seemed a hare-brained idea; to enter a team of specially developed Porsche 911s, and become the first manufacturer to try to win the world’s most gruelling race in a conventional sportscar.
After months of testing and development, the Porsche 911 Carrera 3.2 4x4 Paris Dakar (953) emerged. Raised 270mm, it was higher than its road-car equivalent and, with an all-wheel-drive system and double-wishbone suspension, it had been simultaneously stripped of excess weight and strengthened to withstand brutal conditions.
Out of more than 400 vehicles, many of them trucks a
