Face to face with Peugeot's Dakar cars

Before we come to the new 2008 DKR, Peugeot's historical involvement in Dakar requires a little qualification. And the 205 T16 is one hell of a curriculum vitae. Group B was a mutant Eighties rallying breed that lived fast and died young, but its progeny is nevertheless seared on the memory of petrolheads the world over. The Audi Sport quattro, Ford RS200, Metro 6R4 and Lancia Delta S4: listen hard and you can still hear the sound of gravel ricocheting off rock faces.

Words: Jason Barlow and Rowan Horncastle
Pictures: Tom Salt and Rowan Horncastle

This feature originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of Top Gear Magazine

Perhaps the most monstrous metamorphosis of all involved Peugeot's 205. An innocuous innocent, Peugeot's motorsport men pumped it full of steroids and moved its engine to the middle to create the T16, the WRC titan that trounced the competition in 1985 and '86. But it couldn't last. When Henri Toivonen plunged his Lancia into a ravine during the '86 Tour de Corse, the car exploded, killing him and his co-driver. Group B was deemed too fast, too powerful and too dangerous to continue.

Peugeot switched its focus to the Paris-Dakar instead, an unfeasibly tough rally raid into the Sahara and beyond. As a way of promoting your product integrity, it was an impressively left-field move. And effective: Peugeot won four times back-to-back between 1987 and 1990, racking up 48,125 gruelling kilometres in the process. Now, with its Formula One, Le Mans and further WRC adventures (not to mention a new Pikes Peak world record) in the rear-view mirror, Peugeot is back in Dakar. The new 2008 DKR looks suitably nuts, and with Carlos Sainz and Cyril Despres at the wheel, it has the drivers to match. "We are perfectly aware that the Dakar is a very difficult event," Peugeot's CEO Maxime Picat says, "but our aim nonetheless is to win at first attempt in 2015."

Ambitious. Then again, the great Ari Vatanen managed exactly that in 1987. His car, number 205, suffered serious damage before it even left the outskirts of Paris, but he somehow battled back from 274th place to win, 13,000km and a fortnight later.

Number 205 survives, a star exhibit in Peugeot's excellent museum in Sochaux. The last time Ari saw it, he refused to go anywhere near it. Well, he'd probably had his fill. This T16 doesn't get out much these days, but here it stands, in a French quarry, its sheer mustardy yellowness bludgeoning the early-morning murk into submission. With the 2008 DKR generating lots of headlines, Peugeot is keen to talk up its Dakar glory days. Keen enough, in fact, to disinter the '87 car and let us have a go. We'll get to the DKR. First, I have a hero to meet.

To be honest, it isn't just the dank autumn air that's making me shiver. I've driven three different F1 cars and a handful of contemporary GT3 racers, but this - appropriately enough - feels like walking into a lion's den. If the regular car looks dangerous, the Dakar-spec model is uglier than a bulldog with pepper on its bum chewing its way through a wasp nest. Ugly-beautiful. The Dakar car is certainly oddly elongated; there's an extra foot of bodywork and a whole new box section to house the fuel cells. Stands to reason - the Sahara isn't exactly replete with petrol stations, so the competitors have to carry their own supplies between checkpoints. The T16 has four cells in all, two behind the bulkhead and two under the seats, with a 350-litre overall capacity. That pushes the car's weight up to a relatively chunky 1,600kg.

Group B rules dictated a 1.8-litre engine size, but the Dakar 205's unit is enlarged slightly to 1.9 litres, transversely mounted in the middle of a steel spaceframe chassis, and clothed in glass fibre and Kevlar body panels. This perversion of the stock 205 really appealed to me when I was a kid, but with its engine cover hoisted clear, the T16's mess of plumbing, gigantic Garrett turbo and wayward layout only add to a creeping anxiety. It looks like something Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger would have envisaged. The original rally car had a power output of around 450bhp, but there's a bit less to play with today. This is of cold comfort.

There are other issues. Ari's old warhorse hasn't turned a wheel for six months, and the man who's here to kick-start the beast has stuff to say. Alain Labrell's heavily accented words are funny-serious, but as the pre-flight briefing seems to focus mostly on the likelihood of conflagration, my sense of humour has gone firmly AWOL.

"Fire," he says. "It is the big issue we have with this car. Every time we start it, we say a prayer. The turbo runs red hot, so anything that gets close to it makes it very dangerous." He hands me a cylindrical object that looks like a bicycle pump. "You know what this is? If a fire does break out, pull the cap off the end of it and wave it around. Then get out..." He really isn't kidding. In a recent interview, Vatanen, who was almost killed in a T16 during the 1985 Rally Argentina and endured a deep depression during his recovery, noted, "[Group B] got out of hand because the cars were so prone to catch fire. The really bad accidents were because of that."

There's more.

"A complete day in a rally, driving flat-out for 200km or more in the desert, with the temperature rising... it seems impossible! In an F1 car, you are part of the machine. With this car, it is the boss." With that, the T16 splutters into life, settles into a gnarly idle, and growls, "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough." I'm really not sure.

But I love competition cars, and their purity of purpose. The T16 is basically a tin can, with a bit of string to pull the door open, and absolutely nothing else that isn't deemed necessary. As that four-pot bangs and farts behind my head, I check out the instruments: huge rev-counter and boost gauge, oil pressure, water temp, fuel pressure and fuel level. There's a start button and another for the fuel pump. The wiper stalk spears out of the dash, so you can hand-flick it into action without even thinking about it. Ahead of the co-driver sits a compass and two trip computers.

There's barely a millimetre of slack in the steering, clutch pedal or gearchange, but if you find modern cars disappointingly antiseptic, then this one's for you. Forget modish flappy paddles: you can feel the cogs mesh through the palm of your hand as you cradle the gearknob, and all sorts of vibrations tingle the soles of your feet and rattle your ribcage. Even with the turbo interfering with the car's breathing, the revs rise and fall exactly as you'd hope they would. You don't stall.

The quarry owner has helpfully had his guys clear a figure-of-eight quasi-rally stage. There are huge bumps and crests, and various muddy puddles and water jumps. Ahead of this assignment, I'd fretted that rally cars only know one mode - maximum attack - which was a big ask in a priceless museum piece. But now we're here, a low-speed bimble is clearly not on the cards. Besides, what's the worst that can happen?

They say you should never meet your heroes, but what follows is, no word of a lie, the single greatest drive I've ever had in a motor car. Yes, the T16 redefines turbo lag and would slither out of your hands like a bar of soap if you let it. But the immediacy of its controls and responses, and the way it rides grooves and turns, is instantly and massively addictive. For a 27-year-old relic, with half of Africa under its belt, its compliance and poise are superb. Weird to think of a rally weapon as comfy, but 10,000km is a long way to nurse backache.

Group B, of course, wasn't just about colossal power and pace, it revolutionised rallying by introducing all-wheel drive. An epicyclic central diff and viscous coupling varies the amount of grunt going to the T16's front and rear wheels (33/67). In other words, this is one of those cars where what you're thinking is suddenly and thrillingly happening at all four corners. The key is to keep the momentum going. It only takes a few laps to work out how to set it up for the next corner, using power to neutralise understeer before flicking it sideways and holding it in a four-wheel drift. It's easier than it sounds, and the T16 is vastly less of a handful than I'd feared. It also fails to burst into flames.

There are some caveats. On this improvised track, we only make it into third gear twice. Nailing the throttle and keeping it pinned in second gear for the full boost experience is officially an experience, so Lord only knows what it must have been like on the limiter in fourth, fifth or sixth across endless desert plains. Finally, after barely 20 minutes at the wheel, my arms feel like lead balloons and my lungs are bursting.

Alain waves at me. I unleash a flurry of Anglo-Saxon at him through the T16's window. "More?" I hear him say, before I shower him with gravel.

We weren't allowed to drive the new DKR, but given that Peugeot's old-school campaigner from three decades ago is performing perfectly somewhere in a wet French quarry, it comes as something of a worry that the current Dakar prospect is stationary in a boulder-strewn stretch of Moroccan desert, bonnet up, boot open and toolbox out. Especially as TopGear spent many, many hours in the back of an ancient Mercedes W123 taxi trying to get to see its new beast in action.

"Don't worry," Peugeot pilot and off-road legend Stéphane Peterhansel says: "It's not a big problem - I was driving so it would break."

Thirty minutes later back at base, a warped and very much broken suspension component is inspected for damage. After 8,000km of torture, this part finally gave in to the abuse so that Peugeot now knows its life expectancy. Engineers jot down its time of death, replace it and send the car out to try to break something else.

This is testing, Dakar style. Where breaking things is part of the process. And although it's a race in which Peugeot has a glorious history, those happy days of all-conquering 205 T16s are somewhat past their sell-by date. Which means that, 25 years later, Peugeot needs to start destruction-testing an altogether-new car. The bespoke 2008 DKR is the car tasked with bringing modern glory back to Paris. Using all the nous from Peugeot Sport's portfolio of previous projects - WRC, Le Mans and Pikes Peak - a new mindset, philosophy and design has been applied to create the ultimate Dakar competitor.

But unlike most top-level competitors, Peugeot hasn't opted for a four-wheel-drive layout. Instead, all the power from the mid-mounted 340bhp, V6 twin-turbo diesel engine goes to the rear wheels. Fewer driveshafts to break, a decision that puts the 2008 DKR into a different class, and loosens up the restrictive regulations that dominant four-wheel drives face in the process. By being technically a ‘buggy', Peugeot is allowed more suspension travel (460mm plays 250mm) than the 4x4s, bigger wheels, less minimum weight and a trick inboard remote tyre system that allows the car to inflate or deflate its rubber on the move. There's double-wishbone suspension with twin adjustable dampers, a carbon clamshell and a 'box that acts as a place to anchor the suspension, just like the 908 Le Mans car.

Development is not the work of a moment. Even with hugely experienced driver crews on board in the shape of Carlos Sainz, Cyril Despres and Stéphane Peterhansel, everything about a new car needs to be assessed, judged and assessed again. It's all about putting as many miles on the car as possible. To be Dakar-ready, 12,500 miles are needed to test all components, see what breaks and then re-evaluate.

With its unrestricted diesel engine chuntering along, almost totally masked by the suck and blow of huge turbos, the DKR looks and sounds like something from outer space. In fact, the only shared part with a road-going 2008 is the windscreen, and staring at the bulging carbon bodywork is faintly hypnotic. Watching the DKR's damping is equally mind-blowing. It's so ridiculously independent that each corner is doing something completely different and so effectively that the cabin stays completely flat. Both Sainz and Peterhansel told us that the DKR is the most comfortable car they've driven.

"I've not driven a 2WD race car before," admits Peterhansel. "It's completely different, and I'm still learning. I'm having to rewire my brain, usually I see a big hole, rock or jump and slow down. But with this suspension, I can just hit them. In a four-wheel-drive car, I would take some parts at 100kph, but in this car, I can do the same parts at 140kph."

So is Peugeot expecting a maiden victory? In contrast to Maxime Picat (the car company's CEO), Peugeot Sport director Bruno Famin says not. "Just forget about thinking about victory in the first year," he tells us. "Are we Dakar-ready now? No. Will we be at the end of testing? No. We will not be ready for the Dakar 2015 - the project started too late."

An honest, level-headed statement: Peugeot's competitors have evolved their cars over years to make them winners. Famin plans to do the same.

"We're investing a lot of money and energy into this cross-country programme, and we know that you can't get your money back in one year. You need experience. We'll be doing the Dakar for at least three years, but the target for this one is to compete with humility, get as far as possible and acquire experience." Still. You never know. With Peterhansel, Sainz and Despres at the wheel, anything can happen... and probably will.