You’d be forgiven for not entirely grasping the Dacia Sandrider; here was a company best known for bargain basement city cars and SUVs, not dune-bashing V6 buggies. It was wonderfully unbelievable, but sort of unbelievable nonetheless. And yet the Sandrider really is happening, it will be part of the starting group at Dakar 2025, and it now has some proper testing miles under its all-terrain tyres.
The Sandrider has seen all the sights over the past few weeks: Millbrook, Sweet Lamb, and Château de Lastours in France. The schedule of intense testing over many hundreds of kilometres has taken in ‘rocky and demanding terrain’. That bit wasn’t at Millbrook. According to team principal Tiphanie Isnard, the programme exceeded expectations and ‘very few’ issues were encountered, a sentiment echoed by Technical Director Philip Dunabin: “So far everything has gone astonishingly smoothly with no serious problems. We’ve managed to sign off all the basic things in terms of the engine, we’ve done quite a lot more work than we expected to do on the suspension set-up and the transmission settings have been reviewed in terms of the differentials.” Got some decent jump pics in as well, so a successful endeavour all round.
This phase of testing also saw the most famous of the Sandriders behind the wheel: Sebastien Loeb. He added “The testing has gone very well. I did one day in the UK and two days in France. We worked on the suspension and the diff to find a good balance with the car, and I was happy with how it worked. The engine was working well since the start, and we didn’t have any problems. Based on the experience of a brand-new car it’s looking really good and I look forward to continuing the testing in Morocco.”
Ah yes, Morocco. Now things get really serious. Described as the first ‘comprehensive test’ for the Sandrider, the team is now flat out getting the cars prepped for a week in North Africa from June 28th. The plan is to assess the car in terrain most similar to that coming at Dakar in Saudi Arabia in the new year. It’ll be here before we know it.
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