Jeremy Clarkson: Porsche 911 Dakar review

Anyone with even a tiny bit of testosterone in their ­underpants would want to drive this jacked-up, armour-plated Porsche 911 across the Sahara. So what’s stopping you?

Anyone with even a tiny bit of testosterone in their ­underpants would want to drive this jacked-up, armour-plated Porsche 911 across the Sahara. Picture: Supplied

So, Porsche has taken a four-wheel-drive 911 GTS, fitted it with underbody protection and some beefed-up suspension, and called it the Dakar. Which is the coastal Senegalese city that people used to race to from Paris, back in the days when people thought Isis was a peaceful and trouty river that flowed through Oxford.

Very many people were interested in this new car, and I can see why. Because anyone with even a tiny bit of testosterone in their ­underpants would want to drive a jacked-up, armour-plated Porsche 911 across the Sahara. Roaring over the dunes, catching some air, power-sliding through the wadis and shattering the hot silence with that distinctive flat-six ­cackle. Then stopping when the sun went down, making a fire and drinking ice-cold beers till it was time for bo-bos.

Yeah, well the reality isn’t really like that because for the most part you’d be driving through countries that don’t allow beer. And you wouldn’t be able to keep it cool even if they did. And you can’t make a fire as there are no trees, and you can’t realistically power-slide through a wadi because many of them are full of landmines.

Also (and I know this because just last year I drove a beefed-up, armour-plated Jaguar F-Type across the Sahara), catching some air is not fun. Because you know, as you sail through the troposphere, that soon you will land and this will cause the top of your spine to suddenly burst through your hair.

Of course Porsche knew all of this when it was ­designing the 911 Dakar, because back in 1984 it won the Paris-Dakar event with one of its fire-spitting 953s. It will have known that flames, explosions and deep discomfort are the realities of desert driving. But it went ahead anyway, and then put the Dakar on sale, ­expecting people to buy it. For £173,000 ($335,000).

Inside the 911 Dakar

Or more than £200,000 if they wanted some optional extras. Such as a steering wheel.

Maybe it thought these people had large estates full of paddocks and meadows, and that at weekends they’d go out there in their Dakars and do skids. Hmm. I have quite a few paddocks and meadows, and last weekend I had a Dakar too. And I didn’t do that. I sort of wanted to, but it hadn’t stopped raining since before Christmas so the ground was sodden. If I’d gone out there and skidded about for even ten minutes I’d have turned the whole farm into a modern-day version of the Somme and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs would have fined me eleventy million pounds. So I didn’t. And I’m willing to bet that most people who buy a Dakar won’t either.

So, you can’t drive this car in the Sahara as it’s full of landmines, and you can’t drive it in an English meadow as that’s full of water. So where can you take it to experience the magic dust that Porsche’s engineers have sprinkled into its highriding bulletproof undersides? Good question. Mongolia would be great, but spare parts, should you break something – and you will – would be hard to come by. Kazakhstan is also a possibility, and also the ice lakes in Lapland. But these places are too far away to be realistic as after-lunch hooning venues. You are therefore buying a car designed to do something you aren’t able to do if you live in England. Such as drive at more than 70mph (113km/h). So why buy it?

Ah, well, that’s the thing. I’ve a coat in my wardrobe that only ­really works when it’s at least minus 40C. It’s pointless, then, in Chipping Norton, but it’s nice to know that if it did suddenly ­become polar I’d be OK. Same story with my watch, which will work in all sorts of places I’ll never visit. Such as space.

This, then, is what the Dakar is all about, and its rivals from Lamborghini and Morgan. You drive it around as you would drive any other car, but you know if someone suggests a weekend trip to Timbuktu, you’ve just the machine for the job. Which is great, providing you actually can drive the Dakar around like any other car. Or do all the modifications mean it’s hopeless in the real world?

To look at, no. It’s tremendous. And it’s the same on the inside, where, apart from extremely hip-hugging bucket seats, it’s all just standard 911. Apart from in the back, where, on my test car, the seats had been replaced by ­scaffolding. Great if you’ve just flipped it at 160km/h on a mountainside in Ethiopia. You want scaffolding then. But if you want to give two people a lift to the station you really don’t.

Porsche 911 Dakar

Perhaps the most impressive thing is the ride. Porsche clearly didn’t want its customers’ spines bursting through their hair while hammering down the Baja peninsula, so it’s all quite squidgy. And that, on the corrugations and potholes of Britain, is fantastic.

So what about the speed? Well, it has the same 353kW, twin-turbo six-cylinder as the Carrera 4 GTS. It has the same drive line too and the same eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox. So you’d expect the same performance. But no. Because the Dakar is fitted with all-terrain tyres, top speed is just 240km/h. And you have to go back to 1983 to find a 911 that’s slower than that.

It doesn’t half accelerate, though. A quick burst of power on our way to the pub caused my passenger (Kaleb) to use several words of a profane nature. And, weirdly, it corners well too. By rights those tyres should cause it to skid about like a duck on a frozen river, but they don’t. You can do some serious whizzing in this thing.

So, top speed excepted – and that doesn’t really matter – Porsche must be congratulated for making a desert rally car feel so easy to live with. Except for one thing. God, it’s noisy. I took it to London and it would have been more relaxing and quieter to have sat on the roof. When I arrived I was knackered.

I’ve never really been a fan of the regular 911 as it has always been the sensible option for someone who wanted a sports car. And I don’t think sports cars should be sensible. They should have space lasers and exhausts that produce blue flames for no reason. They should be a bit unhinged, and that’s why I actually quite like the Dakar. Because it is.

PORSCHE 911 DAKAR

ENGINE: 3.0-litre, six-cylinder, twin turbo petrol

PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h 3.4 seconds, top speed 240km/h

JEREMY’S RATING: Four out of five stars