You Could Own Sébastien Loeb’s Old Peugeot Dakar Racer

Yes, we’ve been idly browsing Collecting Cars instead of doing actual work again. But sometimes, that’s no bad thing, because it means we spot things like this – a 2015 Peugeot 2008 DKR, built to tackle the world’s toughest off-road races, which could now be yours.

As you can see, it’s very closely related to the roadgoing 2008 crossover. By ‘closely-related’, we of course mean it has the same headlights, tail lights and grille, and otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with its runaround family namesake.

Nestling in the middle of its bespoke tubeframe chassis is a 3.0-litre twin-turbo diesel V6, sending roughly 340bhp to the rear wheels through a six-speed sequential gearbox. Peugeot took the decision to make it two-wheel drive in order to keep weight down and fit longer-travel suspension than a four-wheel drive car could accommodate.

That suspension’s pretty serious: at the back, it has two shock absorbers per wheel, plus remote reservoirs, and overall, ground clearance is somewhere in the realm of 400mm. Take that, speed bumps.

Though the 2008 DKR grabbed headlines for marking Peugeot’s return to the gruelling Dakar Rally, this particular example didn’t actually race there. Instead, it was entered in the 2015 Rallye du Maroc, a similar-format event that takes place in Morocco. There, it was piloted by a Frenchman you may have heard of named Sébastien Loeb, and his co-driver Daniel Elena, finishing 13th.

After its one-off competition appearance, it became the only 2008 DKR to be converted to ‘Plus’ specification, being used as a testbed for developments that would find their way onto the evolved 2016 car, and it remains in that spec today.

After that, it was stored at Peugeot’s museum in Sochaux, France, before being sold to a collector in Italy in 2021. Its European adventure continued, because it’s now being auctioned off in Spain where, with five days to go on the sale, bidding is already up to €45,000, or around £37,750.

The question is, what would you actually do with it? It seems too good to simply be a garage display piece, so we hope whoever buys it has a lot of land on which it could be properly exercised. Alternatively, it still has all its FIA paperwork, so could in theory still be raced in some rally raid competitions. Whatever happens, it’s just about the only second-hand Peugeot 2008 we’re interested in.