Peugeot 2008 DKR shotgun drive

Peugeot 2008 DKR

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 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’s incapable of breaching.

We’ve 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 two 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. Twenty six times he’s been on the Dakar and he’s won almost half the time, which is a reasonable strike rate.

In January, he spent 15 days and almost 10,000km in this car as it lurched, flew and pounded across 4803km 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 460mm of its wheel travel.

It sets industry standards for short overhangs, with a three-metre wheelbase shrouded in a body only 4284mm 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 2993cc turbo-diesel V6, which might offer 'only' 261kW of power, but it revs to 5000rpm 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’s 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.

The Ride
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. That’s partly because not many people have ever had a high-performance diesel engine working behind them, partly because the big turbochargers muffle its inner exertions.

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.

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 heavy berm and 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. The 37-inch Michelins aren’t there for show, and neither are the 355mm discs, clamped by four-piston monobloc callipers.

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 berm, 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 more than it looks like it needs. 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.

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.

All the while, the sophisticated V6 did its best to sound anything but, vocally warbling and undulating with the grip the tyres were getting, turbo whistling old-school, then going very quiet as Peterhansel rested the powertrain in mid-air, before waking it up again.

Dakar Proven
Every day on the Dakar is like this (but, presumably, warmer, longer and often sandier). Every day sees the drivers start around 6:00am, 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 meant 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.

These days, the support trucks don’t have to run on the same routes as the rally cars, so they don’t. That doesn’t mean life is necessarily easier for the crews, though. Every day starts for them at around 5:00am, checking their handiwork from the night before, with the cars leaving around 6:00am.

If everything goes well, they return to the bivouac before 5:00pm, with the mechanics and engineers working on them for about eight hours before they snatch some sleep. If everything doesn’t go well (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.”

There’s a lot of work to do if you leave everything or nothing to chance. The only things that need to remain on the car from start-to-finish are the roll cage, the chassis and the engine block. That means there are at least four full spare rally cars built up and ready to go inside the service trucks, and lots more besides.

“The car arrives and the mechanics start to check everything. Every car has its own race engineer and four dedicated mechanics, plus there are specialist departments like the damper guys, the suspension people and the brake people,” Fabin said.

“The initial thing is a spanner check and brakes and suspension checks, then there are the lists of things that are lifed and have to be changed.

“We have a safe limit for every component. We change the ball joints every second day and we know at 1000km to remove the damper and put the spare one on, then we rebuild the old damper and put it back in turn. There are probably 30 critical parts like this that are lifed in the car.”

But a 1000km changeover point doesn’t mean that’s what it can manage in testing or what it’s designed to do. Usually, these things are tested to absolute destruction, over and over again, to get a pattern of performance.

“If we run it for 2000km in testing we change it in the race at 1000km. The rules say we can change everything if we want but, for example, we did not change the gearbox for the whole rally this year.

“We changed one on one of the cars because there was a problem but a gearbox will cover 6000km of competitive stages normally and we know we can do 4000km, usually.

“With these kinds of gearboxes, if it starts to wear it is not a sudden breakdown. If MINI had charged at us in the last few days we would have changed it.

“We changed a lot of parts with Stephane’s car because he was in front. It’s a precaution, but if there had been three team cars in front of him then we would not have changed most of them.”

Data Driven
But it goes a lot further than a standard list of changes, because it then turns over to the engineer’s briefing with the crews, and then there’s the data logging.

Peugeot uses just one data-logging expert across its four cars and it’s his job to search through an enormous amount of data on an enormous number of parts to pinpoint potential problems. Fortunately, they’ve got the software set up to do half the job for him.

“If the crew hears a strange noise or hits something unusual they put a marker in the data acquisition. We know automatically if the driver hit the blinker or deflated the tyres. There are markers that go in the data logger.

“We have software to define if there are possible problems,” Fabin said. “We had one problem in the Dakar with one car this year. We could see that the one of the fuel pumps had low intensity and then high electricity consumption. The driver can’t feel anything of the low-pressure fuel pump, of course.

“The car saw that by itself and switched to the back-up fuel pump. Then we saw it in the marker on the data at the end of the day and changed out the bad one.

“It’s for other things, too. We have temperature sensors in the wheel bearings, for example, and if it’s too hot the driver won’t feel it but we know that in 200km or 300km it will break.”

Data logging also helps the drivers to gauge their pace compared to their teammates (and when your team includes a guy who has won the Dakar 12 times and two more with a combined 11 World Rally Championships, that’s a bit helpful). But it’s not like circuit racing, with maybe 15 corners to compare.

“Sometimes for a driver it’s not easy to know what his pace is,” Fabin suggested.

“If a driver has a feeling that he was not quick between two certain points, say 50km and 75km, sometimes they can check the data of another car in the team that they think was quicker.

“If we check and he might have lost three seconds, there’s no need to push more than that feeling because you are on the right pace.

“But it’s not like racing or rallying because it’s not whether you brake two or three metres later or earlier, because it doesn’t make a different out here.

“It’s the style, whether you are hard early and easy later. It’s about what’s more efficient in those conditions.”

It’s not just whether the driver brakes with their left or right foot, either, though Carloz Sainz is the only right-foot braker amongst the Peugeot foursome.

“Stephane always has his left foot always on the brake pedal. Often they are full throttle but left-foot braking a little to stabilize the car over dunes or jumps. For the left-foot brakers, we always change the brakes earlier than for Carlos.”

Peugeot tests so rigourously that even lessons learnt from this year’s Dakar won’t find their way onto the car until the 2018 rally.

Year-long Project
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.

“To evaluate the parts, we need a lot of mileage before we can put it on the race car, so when we are at the Dakar we are already testing the next car.

“If we have something that we learn from this Dakar it won’t be ready for another two Dakars, so the hard part is when we have a part that performs well the drivers want it on the car immediately.

“Last year we had an evaluation damper that they loved. We only tried it in September. It was so good that the drivers said ‘we cannot possibly go to the Dakar without this’.

“With a damper, it’s a little different because we can evaluate it and put test mileage on it on the bench, so we took it but we went with a back up plan, but that’s not normal.”

The Human Cost
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.

Peugeot 2008 DKR specs:
Driver: Stephane Peterhansel
Co-driver: Jean-Paul Cottret
Engine: 2993cc V6 turbo-diesel
Power: 261kW
Torque: 800Nm
Maximum rpm: 5000rpm
Drive: Rear-wheel drive
Transmission: Six-speed sequential
Chassis: Tube frame, carbon-fibre cockpit
Length/width/height: 4284/2200/1794mm
Wheelbase: 3000mm
Wheel travel: 460mm
Brakes: 355mm steel discs, four-piston monobloc callipers
Wheels: 17x8.5-inch magnesium alloys
Tyres: Michelin 37/12.5x17 raid tyres
Fuel tank: 400 litres
Maximum speed: 200km/h