It may have been four decades ago, but Porsche’s pioneering activities in rally-raid competitions are still indelibly burned onto the imaginations of millions. Of all the raid events, it’s the ‘Dakar’ – or the ‘Paris-Dakar’, as it once was – that still burns the brightest: the image of a Rothmans-liveried 911 or 959 climbing a vast sand dune; of traversing the desert floor at high speed with a huge rooster tail of dust relentlessly chasing it; that iconic portrait of a contemplative Jacky Ickx sat in a bucket seat on the sand.
The event was a gigantic, wild, extremely dangerous adventure in its earlier years, somewhere between early 20th century exploration, Mad Max and brutal 1970s-grade motor racing. While the discipline has evolved considerably, sadly without Porsche’s involvement, there will always be a bit of Porsche history indelibly linked to conquering the deserts of northern Africa. It was a very public, and very successful, element of Porsche’s R&D programme during the 1980s.
None of that was what I was expecting to contemplate as I opened a message from Club member Matt Faulks as we conferred about his 986-based, VW turbo-engined Booster project that formed the cover feature for
Porsche Post October 2024. Intriguingly, instead of a torque graph for the 1.8T engine, there was a picture of his familiar daily driver: a rather well-used but trusty 957-generation Cayenne 3.6. Even before I’d read the bit where it said “I’m heading to the desert in November”, I knew from the raised ride height and spotlights that he was embarking on another adventure. I just didn’t know yet that it would be something quite so major…
Fast forward a couple of months and the images pinging through were of said Cayenne traversing rock beds and, yes, climbing giant reddish-hued sand dunes, battling against all manner of far more dedicated raid machinery. Perhaps more than anything, they were images that proved just what an exceptionally well-engineered off-road vehicle the Mk1 Cayenne really is. The original Porsche SUV already has a thriving second life in the ‘overlanding’ scene in the USA, essentially where SUVs are toughened up for expeditions into the American wilderness. That’s slightly different to the UK pastime of ‘green laning’,
a scene hitherto dominated by the indigenous favourite Land Rover, but could the Cayenne find a new life here too?
Later Cayennes have traded some of that dedicated off-road equipment and ability for more efficient on-road qualities, rightly acknowledging that very few customers ever tackle anything more serious than a gravel driveway. The original Cayenne, however, was benchmarked against the best from Jaguar Land Rover and Porsche even promoted these abilities with a ‘works’ entry in the TransSyberia Rally (and launched a limited-edition road model off the back of that participation).
Where to start with this tale of epic adventure? “I was looking for something to do in motorsport, but I don’t have time to commit to 14 races a year,” says Faulks, who runs
his own automotive engineering consultancy as well as being involved in hydrogen powertrains and has a history spanning Formula 1 and rallying. A browse on a popular motoring forum unearthed someone tackling a raid-type event in Tunisia, organised by a Spanish company specialising in such events. Run twice a year, they also did the same type of thing in Morocco. “I’ve always loved Morocco,” adds Faulks. The appeal was instant.
But what to compete in? There must have been a lightbulb moment when his gaze wandered to his driveway and it wasn’t long before the Cayenne seemed the obvious choice. Matt’s overriding goal was to keep it as simple as possible for this exploratory participation, both to create a benchmark as to the 957’s capabilities and, as he knew it would need certain protection underneath for the engine, gearbox and so on or the car surely wouldn’t survive, to keep a lid on costs. In fact, the modifications list is actually very short indeed – but more on that in a moment.
Organised by the Spanish company Patrol Odyssey, the 22nd running of the Maroc Challenge last November was billed as ‘The Dakar of the 70s for today’s adventurers’. Like most motorsport, it runs to a class structure for both vehicles and crews. There are three overall classifications – cars, SUVs and 4x4s – and three levels of participation within those classes depending on the vehicle’s performance, modification and the driver’s experience level – Lite, Adventure and Raid.
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Due to having more than three litres in displacement, the Cayenne was placed in the TT-3 Adventure class and was up against some serious competition. “We ended up rather outgunned by a load of enormous Land Cruisers and I thought ‘this is going to be a bit more of a challenge than we thought…’”. The actual stages feature a target time rather than being an outright blast against the clock, which means a competition licence isn’t required. However, Matt was about to discover that an 80kph average speed takes on a very different meaning when you’re trying to traverse 40ft-high sand dunes.
Ah yes, the Cayenne. Bought “from a SUV dealer on a patch of rough land near Bedford
with an engine check light on some six years ago”, Matt paid £7,500 for it and quickly discovered it was only suffering from a cracked vacuum pipe under the bonnet. Impromptu repair made, it has been his daily driver for the past 70,000 miles, towing all manner of road and race cars and sometimes getting lent to friends to tow as well. Now, with 130,000 miles showing, Matt realised that it was probably due some TLC. What better way to use up the last of its ‘first life’ than entering into a rally raid event?
“I think the 3.6 (petrol V6) is probably the sweet spot in the range in terms of reliability and with the benefit of steel suspension too (not air). The modifications are not extensive. We’ve added spotlights to the nose and fitted a front nudge bar to prevent it being crushed when sliding down dunes. We’ve also taken the lower front bumper off to improve the approach angle, but decided not to do the same at the rear – which is why it’s now hanging off. The car runs its original suspension but with a small lift, and the tyres are BF Goodrich K02 all-terrains mounted on BRAID WinRace T Beadlock wheels. Darkside Developments has supplied some rock sliders, along with guards for the vulnerable mechanical components underneath; it’s the minimal amount of protection you could get away with.”
“On the inside, we have taken the rear seats out to make a flat floor and then all the heavy kit goes in the middle. We’ve used the original mounting points for the seats and the ISOFIX bars to put some eyelets in to strap everything down. Then we have two big plastic boxes in the rear of the car that had all our personal gear and clothes just so they don’t get full of sand, and a spare wheel on the left-hand side. A spare tyre, off the wheel, is mounted on a roof rack.”
Up front in the cockpit, certain equipment is a must. As Matt says: “You have to carry a unit called a Stella III and it’s a very clever bit of kit. It deals with timings and positions. You’re issued a route and you have to stay within 250 metres of that route; you can’t stray off it or take a shortcut. It also warns you of dangers on the path and if another car has broken down. The boxes create a mesh network between all the cars competing. Overtaking is by consent and the way you perform the overtake is via the Stella box. You push the overtake button that will ping the car in front, they have to push their blue button to accept it, and then you get a green light. We 3D-printed a mount for that. It also allows you to phone for emergency medical assistance so, if you have a big one, you can say ‘I’ve crashed – here’. The first thing it will say is ‘Do you need a doctor?’. But then we have some navigation as well, because, of course, you need something to put your GPS waypoints on and actually navigate with, so we’ve used a big tablet with a piece of software called TwoNav on it and that allows us to turn that into a GPS system so we could then track where the car was, what we were doing, how close to the route we were, where the next waypoint was etc.”
All in, the prep work took “some evenings and a few weekends” in the 12-week period before the event. Hardly F1 levels of technical preparation…
The adventure begins with a solo drive down to Portsmouth, as Matt’s co-driver Bridie Salmon has chosen to fly in directly for the event. Some 33 hours on the ferry later, across the Bay of Biscay, and Matt and his Cayenne disembark in Bilbao before beginning the long drive down through Spain until they arrive at the port of Almeria. It’s November 29 2024 and it’s rapidly beginning to dawn on our intrepid Club member that, in his own words, “This is all quite serious, isn’t it?”.
Towering Toyota Land Cruisers and teams with support trucks start to appear on the dockside, all part of a giant convoy that’s due to load up for the ferry across the Mediterranean to Nador in Morocco. Already, the process of falling in love with the event and Africa has begun: “The people are lovely – it’s just the motorsport tribe, right? They know what they want to do, they know how they want to do it, and they’re really pleased that there’s other people that they can share this with for the first time. We were adopted a little bit by some competitors who were giving us lots of tips and tricks. There was an incredible Belgian gentleman in his early 70s who had done it many times before in a big Land Cruiser and another team that had brought 10 cars down between them. They’d done the Dakar before, but they were now just running the ex-Dakar car for fun in the Maroc and said to us ‘If you can do the Maroc well in the Raid category, you could do the Dakar...’”
From there, it’s 539km of driving to the start line of the event on Saturday – in effect, a check stage for crews to settle into desert driving and make sure their equipment is functioning as it should. The event starts for real on Sunday with the first stage from Erfoud to Errachidia, some 245km in total for TT-class Adventure runners, with 184km of those against the clock.
“I decided to drive first and, about one kilometre in, I decided I loved it... and that it’s an insane thing to do,” Matt recalls, with the proverbial Cheshire cat grin. “And, by 1.5km, I realise that the Cayenne desperately needs some dampers that aren’t the standard ones and have the required travel. But most of all, the impression is of how good the Cayenne actually is. You begin to work with what the car has to give you, backing off for the bigger jumps, and I stop to consider that among the panic, fury, dust and trying not to have an enormous crash, the fact is I used to drive this car to work.”
Stage two/day two brings a longer stage length and lots of dunes. Overall, though, it seems that the desert likes to keep you constantly guessing. “Occasionally, it’s a track which will be massively rooted, and obviously the sand moves around. Sometimes it’s gravel. It’s six stages over six days, ranging from between 150 to 260 kilometres for each one. Generally speaking, you will see every sort of terrain in every stage, so from climbing a mountain to going up sand dunes to rutted desert tracks to just plains, dried river beds, rock faces – like I said, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. I thought it’d be like a fast gravel rally in Ireland, just with better weather and maybe some camels. But, er, no…”
By this point, the Cayenne is garnering serious respect from its fellow competitors, plenty of whom have already fallen by the wayside themselves – some in rather spectacular accidents, with cars beached on dunes or with their entire axles ripped off. Once each stage is completed, it’s off to the service area and then on to a pre-booked hotel for the night (all handled in advance by the organisers). That’s apart from the evening of day three, where the route has taken the cars far out to near the Algerian border, and the crews spend the night in a bivouac under the stars.
“It’s super dark, right in the middle of nowhere, so you see the Milky Way, you see the colours of it, and it’s magical”, says Matt, going all misty-eyed for a moment. “It really is a phenomenal landscape to go do some motorsport in. I’ve gotta say, the Moroccan people are incredible too. They’re super friendly, super interested in what you’re doing. They love the cars and want to have a photo with them. You’ll be going through bits where there’s just little townships, but everyone will come out along the road and clap. Wow. It’s a wonderful thing to do.”
By now, Matt, co-driver Bridie and the Cayenne are feeling a little bruised, particularly after a high-speed landing partially rips the rear bumper off. “I was amazed the airbags didn’t go off; it was a big hit.” Having reached day four, the Cayenne team decides that to make it this far is a triumph and that, from here on, it’s about survival with the goal being a finish. “Stage six is primarily a navigation stage, so you get waypoints but not a route, and you have to plot a complex path around obstacles”. Climbing giant dunes that sometimes crumble away at the top, revealing a 40ft drop, the crew slightly misjudge the energy required and end up beached at the very top of a big one. Thankfully, a Brit-crewed Toyota generously offers to pull the Porsche back down and they turn out to be the team that finishes a place ahead of the Porsche’s 26th in-class and 72nd overall – illustrating the camaraderie of the event. A truly remarkable result.
“And then it’s over, right? You reach the finish, in front of a lovely hotel, and have a beer and celebrate, and the adrenaline sort of falls out of you. It was such a sense of achievement to get to the end, finish in a competitive category in the midfield, with essentially a standard Cayenne that had some bits to stop it getting too broken. Phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. I think there were 197 starters and 137 placed, so 60 crashed, broke or, for whatever reason, couldn’t continue.”
For Matt, the adventure doesn’t even end there. After the celebrations, it’s back on the boat to Spain, and then the realisation that he’s elected to drive the Cayenne all the way back leads to a marathon drive through France that includes heavy snow. By the time he’s home, the Cayenne will have driven 3,900 miles but used just 250ml or so of oil. When Matt gets up for work the next day, his replacement daily driver – a diesel Mercedes – fails to start on account of a dead battery, so he fires up the Cayenne and commutes to work, caked in desert sand and with its battle scars proudly showing. I’m not sure what’s more impressive: the scope and challenge of this driving adventure or the engineering depth to the 957 Cayenne. As you can probably tell, Matt has been well and truly bitten by the rally-raid bug and aims to return to the desert this autumn for another go at the Maroc Challenge, putting into practice all the lessons learnt on vehicle preparation and driving technique. He’s even drawn up a spec for the Cayenne, closely mirroring what he rallied last year, but with much improved dampers for improved off-road ability. Like Messrs Ickx, Metge and others all those years ago, the lure of the desert is too strong.
This feature was written by Adam Towler and first appeared in the February 2025 issue of our monthly Club magazine, Porsche Post. to receive your copy, as well as enjoying a host of exclusive member benefits and savings.
Your desert challenge awaits!