The only things more ugly than Peugeot’s 2008 DKR are the roads it is built to race on.
Of course, even associating its name with a Peugeot that mere motoring mortals can actually buy, own and drive is a bit cheeky. The list of parts it shares with the standard 2008 Peugeot is longer only than the list of barriers it is incapable of breaching.
We have been invited to France to sit beside Stephane Peterhansel, the Man of Men of the Dakar rally, which he won, in this very car, just a few months earlier. It's not a new thing for him. He has won the Dakar six times in cars (if you can call them that). He won it six times before that on bikes. And 26 times he has been on the Dakar and he's won almost half the time, which is a reasonable strike rate.
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In January, he spent 15 days and almost 10,000km in this car as it lurched, flew and pounded across 4,803km of special stages in Argentina and Bolivia. You'd think he'd be sick of the sight of it.
The 50-year-old Peterhansel sees it as a very attractive machine, but few would agree with him. It’s built to do a very difficult job and anything that might visually link it to Peugeot takes a seat so far back that it’s like abstract art.
You have to actively search for meaning in some things that might be related to road-going Peugeots, or not.
It’s a massive space-frame machine, rear-wheel drive and built to deliver tremendous wheel travel so that it doesn’t break everything, especially those in the cockpit, when it lands.
Its stick-on Peugeot grille is belt high. The top of the front wheel arch is almost chest high. It’s so ugly it scares rocks into moving out of the way, though when the Peugeot is travelling near its 200km/h top speed, they don’t move fast enough, which is why it needs all 460 millimetres of its wheel travel.
Residual space
It sets industry standards for short overhangs, with a three-metre wheelbase shrouded in a body only 4,284mm long – and its 43kg wheel-and-tyre combinations occupy a lot of the residual space.
Behind the carbon-fibre cabin and safety cell sits a 2,993cc turbodiesel V6 engine, which might have “only” 261kW of power, but it revs to 5,000rpm and cranks 800Nm of torque through the six-speed sequential transmission.
We’ve been allocated the seat normally occupied by Jean-Paul Cottret, the 52-year-old Frenchman who has sat alongside Peterhansel for every one of his road-car wins. There’s not a lot of space for him in the car, either, not once the four display screens, two floor-mounted buttons, battery-powered rattle gun and all the system control switches are crammed in.
That, and a cage that’s built for strength, speed and security, with little regard to human elasticity, mean the Dakar is best left for smaller folk.
Peterhansel, never unstrapped from his six-point harness, bends forward, smiles, introduces himself. On a snowy, blustery day that’s the polar opposite of the conditions the 2008 DKR has been designed to master, he then mercilessly attacks a piece of countryside that no production Peugeot could ever hope to traverse, no matter the speed, with the possible exception of a precariously ridden bicycle. Or a patiently rolled pepper grinder.
It’s instantly obvious that this is no all-wheel drive World Rally Car or even a Group N machine. There isn’t the outrageous all-wheel drive launch from a standing start, though the locking diff means it’s not bad. There’s plenty of wheelspin and the launch is hard, exacerbated by the soft springing making it all squat brutally on its hindquarters.
And then there’s the noise. It’s an odd thing, deep, with a surprising perception of revving a lot higher than it actually does, and it’s relatively quiet.
You can’t mask its potency, though, and as the gears rise, so does the unmitigated drive coming from the back end. And it all starts to make sense.
You wouldn’t call it flow, because that sounds smooth. You see these things from the outside, with their bodyshells remaining stubbornly flat as the wheel travel soaks up the worst of what’s beneath them. You could come to believe things were like that inside, too. They’re not.
You can feel everything that’s happening beneath the Peugeot. It’s surprisingly accurate with its portrayal of what’s going on way down there at road level as it dances from bump top to bump top.
Crunching down
Peterhansel is deliberately aiming the car at the worst of the road, just to show off, and it covers every possible attitude between crunching down onto its flat skid plate to launching itself high in the air.
And all that’s before we’ve found the first corner. It’s a steeply downhill hairpin right hander, with a great mud puddle at the apex. In the first real surprise, Peterhansel brakes late and the desert rubber bites at the road with the same sort of retardation you’d expect of a road-going sports car on a track day.
Then comes the driving technique. Not one to question his mastery, I can only wonder at the amount of plough understeer he cranks on when the going is tight. He pounds the car headlong into the bend, still hard on the brakes, then uses both feet to play the brake and the throttle against each other while shockingly scrubbing the nose with far more steering lock. He has the front wheels driving on the sidewalls, not the tread.
And then it hits the puddle and the mud, emerging up through the radiator vents in the bonnet, blocks everything on both the windscreen and the passenger screen, which is the one he’s actually peering out of. The washer jets are surprisingly feeble, taking an age to clear the screen, by which time the Peugeot has lurched straight again.
A couple of rough, blind jumps later and the rally raider tips into a left-hand hairpin, and he uses the exact same technique. Brake hard, crank the steering around to the lock stops, keep braking and then fiddle with the pedals again.
Time and again, this is his hairpin technique. It’s ugly and it’s clearly not the sort of terrain the car’s built for, because it turns into a serious machine when the road gets quicker. Quicker in this thing doesn’t mean the road gets flatter. It just means the road gets straighter. Flat, not flat, very not flat: it’s all the same to the 2008 DKR. At no time does Peterhansel back off the throttle to take it easy on the car over a regular rut or jump.
But the balance of the big machine feels exquisite in faster corners. It's only once or twice tossed off its line by the topography, and then Peterhansel flicks a wrist to catch it and it drives forward easily again. It's the sort of thing that feels infinitely catchable and fun. The only time he braked was for a ditch of a type, size and depth the French mastered in the 1930s, without reckoning on any potential martial opponent transiting through Belgium without a ticket. Even then, he only knocked it back two gears, stood back on the throttle and bounded through, while my helmet decided I didn't need to see much anymore. Probably just as well, really.
Clearly, he didn’t worry about breaking the tube-frame chassis or the long-travel suspension, and I’m sure he’s put it all through much, much worse in the Argentinian backblocks far from prying cameras. Bodywork is another story, because it’s considered expendable.
We came off a small crest at the highest point of the test track only to aim up at a snippet of windscreen where the road bent slightly right and stopped existing, while the tops of the trees lasted just metres more. And Peterhansel pulled sixth gear, deliberately aimed at a jump on the apex and hurled the car into the French sky.
Pumping along
Sure, it was a sharply downhill landing but the Peugeot landed like a dandelion with a parachute. It came down nose first, but it never got near the (substantial) bump stops, even though it jumped maybe 40 metres in length and 20 metres down, while pumping along at somewhere around 170km/h. Peterhansel rested the powertrain in mid-air, before waking it up again.
Every day on the Dakar is like this (but, presumably, warmer, longer and often sandier). Every day sees the drivers start around 6am, trundle through 200km or so of transport sections (trailed by a team car, complete with a mechanic and an engineer, just in case anything glitches) and then attack the special stages.
On this year’s Dakar, that means up to 542km of full-on blasting, though it averages out to “only” 370km a day, which is about a full modern-era WRC weekend.
Peugeot pulls together a team of 94 people and 26 cars and trucks to get its four raid cars to the start line each day, including two osteopaths and a doctor. Evidently, you need two osteopaths.
Every day starts for them at around 5am, checking their handiwork from the night before, with the cars leaving around 6am.
Snatching sleep
If everything goes well, they return to the bivouac before 5pm, with the mechanics and engineers working on them for about eight hours before they snatch some sleep. If everything doesn’t go well (and they had to completely rebuild Sebastien Loeb’s destroyed car overnight this year), there goes the sleep.
"We have to sleep when we can," Peugeot Sport engineer Bruno Fabin said. "That's the best advice I could give anybody new to the Dakar. Don't look at the sights or talk to everybody. Just sleep when you can . . . If you don't have a job to do right then, sleep. Someone will wake you up when there's something for you to do."
In any given year, the team spends just two weeks not working on the Dakar project. Even Peterhansel’s co-driver, the 52-year-old Cottret, dedicates 30 weeks a year to the event.
“As soon as we finish we already have the specification of the next car for the next year before we look to strip down the winning car,” Fabin insisted.
Then there are the human considerations. The drivers and co-drivers get paid for speed and that means not stopping. For anything.
“If you are sick it’s a problem,” Cottret said. “And in all my years I have had a problem only one time and had to stop for a pee. As for the other, normally we are just careful with what we eat and drink and we don’t have it.”
Peterhansel himself laughed it off, insisting they just drank very little and ate sparingly for three weeks. That might be tougher on Cottret than his driver, though, because while the route book isn’t a set of pace notes, it’s tightly packed and he rarely goes more than 10 seconds without speaking.
Cottret insists he’s never worried with Peterhansel at the wheel. I couldn’t say the same, though the master only delivered one real cause for pause. The humble trickle of water from the windscreen washer failed completely on a puddle in a hairpin, leaving the windscreen thickly plastered in mud and with brown water streaming in through the roof vents. It didn’t concern him. He had pulled four gears in the time it took for any hint of vision returned. He knew the road intimately. I didn’t, but that wasn’t the worrying thing.
No, the worrying thing was that I got the feeling it wouldn’t have mattered much if he hadn’t known the road intimately. He’d have still pulled four gears before he could see anything.
