Twelve months after the one-two finish in the category for two-wheel drive vehicles, and the best result for a diesel engine car, Volkswagen is to take on the Dakar Rally again (1-18 January 2004). For the first time, the team under new Motorsport Director Kris Nissen will compete with two newly designed Volkswagen Race-Touareg cars. Both the desert racers, fitted with five-cylinder TDI engines producing over 230 bhp, will make their competition debut in the desert rally covering almost 11,000 kilometres between France and Senegal.

All the pick-up points for subassemblies, bodywork and suspension components are integrated in the space frame, which weighs only a third of a tonne, and functions, as it were, as roll cage. High-tensile aircraft steel guarantees an ultimate tensile strength of up to 700 Newton-metre per square millimetre

 

They don't even look like the same truck.

 

damnnnn that looks fun

 

can you say roof scoop!

 

the only thing related between the 2 is ... the name?

 

Yeah, it appears that the Race-Touareg is to the Touareg as the NASCAR Torus is to the one the lady down the street drives.

It's a shame that Porsche isn't running a Cayenne in the Dakar. They've won it before, with a 959 that was quite similar to the production version. (If you can count a few hundred vehicles as "production." ) Running a production Cayenne would be the ultimate validation of the Porsche truck as a true performance vehicle.

 

WOW
that would be so much fun to drive