Producing 360bhp, the engine (running on synthetic Aramco fuel) will shift a rallying prototype which weighs around 1800kg. The Sandrider runs on massive 37-inch Goodrich tyres, which weigh 44kg each with the rims in.

In addition to the mighty suspension and shock absorption needed to take high impacts at speed, the car also has a number of interesting innovations to tackle the heat in extreme conditions.

The solution is in the carbon-fibre bodywork, which features pigments and resin which reduces infrared absorption and keeps temperatures in the cabin cooler. The company has filed a patent for this design, which is used in its road cars.

As Isnard emphasises, it’s “not all about pure performance”, with the focus also on making the drivers as comfortable as possible.

On this point, technical director Dunabin highlights another innovation on the Sandrider.

“There’s been a number of incidents in rally raids where cars land very heavily, and that’s created a number of back injuries, particularly for co-drivers,” he says.

“So Prodrive has worked on a system to add what is called a seat attenuator, so when the impact goes over a certain G level, the seat will then move and there is like a shock absorber system, so the seat is not completely rigidly fixed.

“In normal impact, the seat doesn’t move at all but, when there is a really big one, the seat can move downwards and it absorbs it.

“For the moment, these are the only cars running this system. The application will come into the rally raid regulations for any new cars from 2027 onwards. But it is already in place here.”

The car also has anti-reflective matte paint to stop drivers being blinded and seatbelts made from anti-bacterial fabrics that self-regulate humidity.

How much testing has the Dacia Sandrider had?

There’s no event tougher on cars than the Dakar, so it’s remarkable that the car only had its first test in May.

Following a rollout at the Millbrook proving ground, the Sandrider took on the famous Sweet Lamb rally stage in Wales as its first off-road foray.

After three days in the UK, the going got rougher with four days in Château de Lastours in France before a July run in the Moroccan desert.

“The reliability side of it, I think, is the most difficult,” Dunabin says. “You can afford to not win stages every day, but you can’t afford to lose time to problems.

“Problems tend to, if you’re not careful, just aggravate themselves. It creates more work. That means that other things are not checked or are missed, and then you just tend to get on the slippery slope to the exit from the event.”

However, it’s so far been smooth running on rough terrain for Dacia.

Making its competitive debut at the Rally Raid World Championship’s Morocco round in October, Al-Attiyah led home Loeb for a 1-2 finish. The Sandrider was both fast and reliable.

Things only get harder from here. The Morocco event was 2000km (1243 miles ), while Dakar is over double that.

Though immediately competitive upon its Dakar debut in 2021 when entering as a privateer, Prodrive has suffered a number of snags, little and large, which have prevented it from taking the ultimate prize.

At its 2021 debut using the in-house Hunter prototype, it realised the wheels were too small to take the bigger impacts, and navigation issues meant that Sébastien Loeb twice got lost in the desert.

It’s also had repeated puncture problems, while in 2023 Al-Attiyah was unwilling to play the Prodrive team game.

So severe can problems be on the Dakar, that team-mates – and sometimes even rival competitors – stop to help, with eventual winners Audi putting on an almost F1-like tyre change mid-stage between its three cars last year.

To take on the 2023, Prodrive fielded two works and five privateer cars so that no-one was left without a helping hand.

Unfortunately, Al-Attiyah had other ideas. After early reliability problems put him out of the competitive running, the Qatari promptly flew home instead of hanging around to help.

With Al-Attiyah out and the privateers a long way off, his team-mate Loeb was left indignantly standing next to his car when the inevitable puncture struck as his rivals sped by.

As the Prodrive ‘pals’ have become Dacia denizens, will the colleagues play the team game this time round?

What support vehicles will Dacia take to the Dakar?

Dakar isn’t all about the new-fangled beasts used by Loeb, Al-Attiyah and Gutierrez.

The Dacia/Prodrive effort is taking a huge support effort to make sure it never goes a spanner short.

“Part of the challenge of Dakar it is a team event, and we pay quite a lot of attention to the human side,” says team manager Alan McGuinness.

“We have 25 vehicles carrying 62 people, so we’ve got to [think how to] sleep those. We have 14 roof tents, various single-person tents and nine motor homes to house some of the other team members, the medical team, the drivers and co drivers.”

Dacia has two huge trucks carrying a myriad of spares, with another acting as the engineering centre for meetings and debriefs.

There’s a support vehicle for each competitor, housing “the rally car engineer, the number one and two mechanic, and one of our system specialists are in each of these vans,” says McGuinness.

“We start at the bivouac very early, and might have 100, 150, 200km to do before we get to the stage start. We have two drivers per vehicle to share the driving.

“On the ‘common route’, we are allowed to service [after competitive stages]. So this gives us a bit more flexibility with these vehicles, because they can leave, follow the car, then can meet them at the end of the stage.

“They can put a set of brakes on and bed it in for the following day, all that kind of stuff. But it’s only allowed on the ‘common route’, so we have to do a separate plan every day to cope with that.

“Similarly with the bigger truck, that would go to the start of the stage [to] make sure all three cars are okay – give Sébastien his espresso in the morning, which is the most important thing in terms of performance!

“In the evening, we service the cars, and then go to refuel – that takes about an hour. The tanks are 560 litres. We do like to spend a lot of time with the engineers getting the right fuel level in there for the following day.”

A new set of tyres for each Dacia prototype is ready for every stage. With three cars, that works out at 144 tyres across the two weeks, with some re-used if necessary.

Overall it’s a huge effort to make Dacia’s Dakar dream a reality. It’s one shared by Prodrive and Loeb, neither of whom have won what the Banbury firm’s founder David Richards calls the “Mount Everest of motor sport.”

All the evidence so far though points to 2025 being its best chance yet.