Peugeot has announced that it is to return to the Dakar rally next year, in collaboration with Red Bull Motorsports and Total, and this is the car they'll be using.
Called the 2008 DKR, it's based on the 2008 crossover. Sort of. Peugeot claims the rally car "shares an unmistakable family resemblance with Peugeot's road-going crossover," but, to be honest, we're struggling to see much of a resemblance.
In fact, instead of basing the 2008 DKR on the road car, Peugeot has been a little more thorough in its engineering.
"There were two ways we could have approached this task: either by taking a standard 2008 and grafting on bespoke parts, or else by drawing inspiration from the 2008's defining overall forms to design a car that covered the constraints inherent in its mission," said the car's designer Giovanni Rizzo. "We eventually decided to go down the second path."
Unfortunately, very little information on the 2008 DKR has been released; however, one thing we DO know is that, unlike most of its competitors, the car will use a rear-wheel drive, rather than a four-wheel drive setup.
Peugeot's reasoning for this is that by not fitting four-wheel drive, it makes it possible to add bigger wheels -- they're 37-inchers, in case you were wondering -- and more suspension travel.
"We carried out an in-depth analysis of what already existed in the world of cross-country rallying and weighed up the benefits of the different solutions, said Peugeot Sport's project leader Jean-Christophe Pailler. "Given the off-road capability of two-wheel drive transmission and its ability to run on sand, that's the choice we ultimately went for."
Given Peugeot's previous success in the Dakar -- the firm won it four years on the trot between 1987 and 1990 with the legendary 205 T15 and 405 T16 -- we're expecting great things from their return.
The 2015 Dakar rally begins on 3rd January 2015 in Argentina.
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