Amateurs who battled Dakar with champagne, oysters & a Rolls-Royce

De Montcorgé invited me to a sandpit just outside Paris to drive his Corniche. It doesn’t measure so much as a mile, compared with the 6000 or more it had to endure across the Sahara. The Corniche reached Dakar, but was unclassified after a steering arm failure. Since then, with a dent removed from the front, it is now almost exactly as it was when it pulled into Dakar.

Before I am allowed behind the wheel, Thierry shows me around his old friend. He sold it a few years ago but they reunite fairly regularly. The bond is still close. His name and blood type (the Dakar is said to have claimed 70 lives since its inception 40 years ago) remain on the door, which is festooned with period sponsorship stickers.

On the outside it still looks like a Corniche, albeit one that has been on a Schwarzenegger body-building course. Inside, only the wood dash (with disconnected air-con vents) and dials are original. “We navigated using the odometer,” says Thierry, perched in one of the bucket seats. The leather benches went with the rest of the donor car. He designed it to be strong and comfortable and have huge grunt. With up to 700km a day to endure, little else mattered. One stage, en route to the oasis of Timbuktu, stands out in Thierry’s mind for the Rolls performing at its best.

“It was a big desert in southern Algeria, with a big, big, long, long road and we were at maybe 150kph. It was like [driving] on the snow and the ice or being in a little boat. It was ‘fantastique’. In my memory the sand was very white and it was so smooth – and the car was running perfectly. I keep this image in my head.”

This image now in my head, I pull the original Corniche door shut with a very un-Rolls thud. It starts with the original key but ignites a brutish V8 connected to a pair of exhaust pipes emanating from beneath the doors. This is no Roller. It’s a Rocker.

Ballet shoes would be better than work boots to operate the pedals, which sit uncomfortably close to each other. Given that the brakes are next to useless and second gear seems to suit most eventualities.

The course we have is a lap up and over a pile of sand so yellow it looks to have come from a cartoon palette. It’s hard to walk on but the massive tyres chomp into the silica and propulsion is never in doubt. Thierry had told me of a day when the Rolls charged up and over 30-metre dunes that entrapped most other cars. They never got stuck. With 390lb ft of torque, I can understand why.

“I remember we had a little mountain and everybody was stuck – maybe 10 cars. We went around them, climbed the mountain and were laughing. It was so easy.”

It might have four-wheel drive, unlike its donor car, but somehow this desert brute has retained some of the Spirit of Ecstasy. I once drove a stock Phantom through the Atacama Desert and was staggered at the off-road ability of a car made to waft along the highway. It even soaked up large rocks and deep holes. Despite having had its pure British DNA compromised, the Corniche’s steering is still finger-tip light, the ride is supple and (as Rolls likes to say when questioned) it has ‘sufficient’ power.

Imagine Muhammad Ali in a tutu and this is pretty much what Thierry has built. I rarely get above 40mph but can imagine floating across the Sahara at more than 100, the sloshing of fuel and Pomerol and the fading odour of shellfish as an accompaniment.

But for the collision with a tree and vital time lost, the Rolls could have finished high on the Dakar leaderboard. Instead, it was allowed by Dakar creator Thierry Sabine to finish unclassified. Possibly because Christian Dior had laid on enough champagne (and possibly oysters) in Dakar for the whole field.

“The best memory for me was on the beach at Dakar,” former Jules PR boss Joëlle Demange says. She has come to reunite with Thierry and Michel and see the car that captivated the world in January 1981. More than 1600 articles and 150 TV reports featured the luxury desert cruiser carrying the Jules name. “Everybody – everybody was looking for the Rolls Royce – no other cars. It was the princess of the desert at that time. Everybody was waiting for the Rolls-Royce.”

Dwarfed by the attention the Rolls received, the winner of that year’s Dakar was René Metge in a works Range Rover. “The Rolls was the star that year, it was a great idea and done seriously and professionally,” Metge says. “It really was the last endeavour of its kind, an amateur team attempting what the Dakar had started; it was fun, but with a strong sense of adventure.”

Now Rolls-Royce has made its own 4×4 SUV, the Cullinan, maybe it should look at a return to the Dakar? Joëlle recalls the then-boss of Rolls told her he had had dozens of enquiries to buy a rally Corniche. It never did make one, and having benefited from immense publicity didn’t complain too much to Thierry about use of the firm’s name for his gain.

“I received a letter from Rolls-Royce six months after the rally. It was very, very polite,” Thierry says. “Dear Monsieur de Montcorgé – you know that it’s a brand patent and you know you have no right to use it. Please in future don’t do that again.”

And he didn’t. Thierry and the Corniche only did the one Dakar. By 1982 the rally was getting seriously competitive and the days of champagne and oysters were all but gone.

“It didn’t change my life,” he says, “but I’m glad when people remember the Rolls-Royce that did the Dakar.”

Dakar oddities

These competitors have the distinction of fielding some of the oddest rallying machines ever built