After months of swirling rumours, today Porsche has confirmed it will be unveiling a very special off-road 911 later this month at the LA Auto Show. Set to be named the Porsche 911 Dakar, the go-anywhere, do-anything two-door is a nod to the German automaker’s first overall victory at the 1984 Paris-Dakar rally that was won by a modified 911 that was the first all-wheel drive of its kind.
While technical specifications are scant at the moment (all is likely to be revealed at the LA Auto Show), Porsche has confirmed that the vehicle has undergone extremely thorough testing over more than 500,000kms, with no less than 10,000kms of testing completed off-road. Not limited by the brand’s off-road testing locations in Weissach, Porsche has put the 911 Dakar through its paces around the world including at the Château de Lastours test track in southern France, on frozen lakes in Arjeplog, Sweden, and even on the sand dunes of Dubai and Morocco.
In addition to the Porsche engineers testing the new off-roader, the automaker handed the keys over to Two-time world rally champion Walter Röhrl for the cold weather testing, who expressed his satisfaction with the new offering. “The car is incredibly fun to drive,” Röhrl said. “Everything works so precisely and calmly. No Porsche customer will believe all the things you can do with this car before they’ve driven it themselves.”
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Endorsements don’t get much better than that, but a similar sentiment was arrived at by the Porsche works driver Romain Dumas, who had the pleasure of putting the 911 Dakar through its paces at Château de Lastours testing site.
“All Dakar teams come here to test their cars in Europe before the rally,” he explained. “I knew what a 911 could do on the road,” says Dumas, “but I was absolutely stunned by how well the car performed here on the loose.”
While we’ll have to patiently wait for more information until the LA Motor Show opens its doors on the 18th of November, but the most exciting sentence in Porsche’s press release speaks to exactly how versatile the 911 Dakar promises to be.
“Even jumps were no problem for the chassis thanks to the robust design and increased ground clearance.”
– Porsche
The entire BH team will be lining up to get behind the wheel of this one.
