Inside Dacia’s £1m desert buggy taking on big boys at the Dakar Rally – with juicy V6 engine and aerospace roll cage

THIS is my kind of dry January – caked in sand and sun cream watching the legendary Dakar Rally.

I’m here with Dacia.

That’s right, Dacia.

The people who make Britain’s cheapest new car. The £14k Sandero supermini.

Only they’ve built a £1million desert buggy (Dacia Sandhero?) to conquer the world’s toughest off-road race.

For those of you who don’t know, Dakar is a punishing 3,200-mile speed test across the breathtaking dunes of Saudi Arabia.

Basically, the entire WRC season in 13 days.

Add the non-competitive road sections between each timed stage and it’s the equivalent of a full year of Formula 1. In less than two weeks.

Quite a challenge, then.

So why is a budget brand spending upwards of £25million to go off-road racing against the might of Ford and Toyota when it doesn’t really need to?

Sandero is the No1-selling motor across Europe. Dacia is No2 for people who buy a car with their own money. The brilliant £24k Duster 4×4 is a contender for 2025 European Car of the Year.

Life is good.

The answer is, Dacia is about to launch a bigger SUV called Bigster.

Think Nissan Qashqai rival. So it needs to make a noise to get noticed in such a competitive segment — and Dakar is marketing gold.

Boss Denis Le Vot said: “When we relaunched the brand, we asked ourselves what a Dacia should be, and we wrote, ‘robust and outdoor, essential but cool’.

“Once we had that we said, ‘F***, this is the Dakar!’ So we stopped everything we did before. Like football in Italy, rugby in England, and said we would do one thing big and do it properly.

“Dakar is a new adventure for Dacia and will bring it to the next level.”

The desert racer is powered by a 3-litre V6 twin-turbo sending 360hp to all four wheels. The suspension travel is hilarious. The tyres are 37 INCHES. The roll cage is aerospace steel.

This thing has more wires and software code than a SpaceX rocket. Probably.

The fuel tank is 520 litres. Ten times bigger than a Sandero.

British team Prodrive has an army of 62 engineers out here in Saudi as support crew.

Obviously, Dacia doesn’t sell a car with a juicy V6 in it, so they tapped up their friends at Nissan and transplanted engines from the Nissan Z sports car.

Today is day six of this remarkable race and Dacia is still in the mix.

Superstar driver Nasser al-Attiyah dropped from second to seventh after a puncture on yesterday’s 258-mile stage.

But there’s still a long, long way to go.

Five-time champ Nasser told me: “Anything can happen on Dakar. We’ll keep pushing. We have the tools to win.”

Team-mate Sebastien Loeb flipped his buggy on stage three and was forced to retire with a damaged roll cage.

Last year’s winner Carlos Sainz rolled his Ford M-Sport Raptor the day before.

Like I said, toughest race in the world.

Magic dust

THE millionaire boss of Prodrive has bought a £24k Dacia Duster.

David Richards, the motorsport guru behind Dacia’s Dakar project, said: “At the farm we have a Subaru that’s 17 years old. That’s out. The Duster arrives next week.

“I will use it some days. My wife will use it. The people around the farm will use it. When the kids come home at weekends, they will use it. We just need a couple of baby seats for the grandchildren.

“I’ve followed the Dacia brand for a few years now, I’ve seen the product they are delivering, and the popularity of it.

“It’s a value for money product. So many cars nowadays keep adding items on to them that are possibly unnecessary and you don’t want to pay for them. Duster seemed to be a practical car to have.”

Prodrive famously turned Subaru into the darling of performance car fans, steering Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Petter Solberg to world rally glory. Can history repeat itself with Dacia?

Richards said: “I think there is a very similar potential here with Dacia. If we can do what we did with Subaru back in those days, we had the marketing support around it, and then we can expand it beyond Dakar.

“Dacia has all the ingredients for an incredible future – and hopefully motorsport can play a strong part in that.”