Four Le Mans 24-hour victories may be the most precious jewels in the Rothmans Porsche crown, but this famous partnership took several exhilarating detours into other forms of motorsport. Most exciting of all was the firm’s assault on the Paris-Dakar Rally.

Historically, Porsche was no stranger to off road competition. The 911’s unique engine position provided superior traction by lumbering over the rear driven wheels. The resulting advantage in slow corners made the 911 a formidable weapon, particularly on tarmac rallies. Starting in 1968, the 911 clocked up three victories at the famous Rallye Monte Carlo.

In 1980, Audi’s revolutionary ‘quattro’ four-wheel-drive system transformed rallying overnight and threatened to consign two-wheel drive contenders to history. Audi’s instant success promised an inevitable trickle down of technology to performance road cars. Porsche had to react.

Rather than join Audi in the rapidly intensifying brawl of Group B and the World Rally Championship, Porsche settled on a more unorthodox avenue to test and develop an all-wheel drive version of their 911.

“In 1982, when Jacky Ickx won the world sports car championship at Brands Hatch with that famous drive, he was already talking to Dr Helmuth Bott about four-wheel drive and the Paris-Dakar. Porsche wanted to go four-wheel drive. They were just looking for the reason to do it” remembers Rothmans’ sponsorship boss, Richard Watling. “It was all down to Jacky Ickx really. He is a very persuasive person! He was passionate about rally raid and Africa.”

The 1984 Paris-Dakar rally involved 6000 competitive kilometres across arid, brutal environments in Guinea, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. Tackling such an intense challenge demanded unflappable drivers and an equally resilient machine. However, as many Dakar veterans will attest, so is a colossal budget. Enter Rothmans.

“I can’t say that every single decision that we made was based on some sort of great strategy” laughs Watling. “Porsche came to us a sponsor. Would we be interested in doing it? Yes, we would! We had a very big African business and hadn’t done anything there before because Kyalami was really the only place for endurance racing. By now, Porsche had become our number one thing in motorsport. We were keen to do it.”

With Rothmans backing now secure, Porsche prepared a four-wheel drive version of the 911 SC for the twenty-day onslaught from Paris to Dakar. 30,000 fans gathered on New Year’s Day 1984 to witness two immaculately presented Rothmans 911s rolling off the start line. Jacky Ickx and French comedian, Claude Brasseur, took the reins of the first 4x4 911. Rene Metge and Dominique Lemoyne drove the second works Porsche entry.

Despite the superb attendance in central Paris to wave the crews on their way, the true challenge of the Dakar rally really began in Africa. However, bringing this extraordinary spectacle from the vast, lonely expanses of Sierra Leone to the casual viewer’s living room was seemingly impossible. Not for the cunning and financial might of Rothmans’ PR department. Richard Watling remembers the lengths the Rothmans team went to capture the action:

“We had a little aircraft which we flew in with an extraordinary man called Brian Kreisky. We dropped him in the desert with enough rations to last a couple of days. He sat there and took pictures as the cars came past. He waited for about a day, then heard this noise in the background that got louder. Then, dust! He missed the car! They’d taken a different route on the day. A sandstorm then came in and he had to hunker down for another 24 hours before we could get the aircraft in to rescue him.”

After twenty days and 12,000 total kilometres, the Rothmans Porsche of Metge and Lemoyne reached the finish line at Rose Lake ahead of ninety-seven other cars and trucks. Despite being a driving force behind the project, Jacky Ickx had to settle for sixth place after an earlier electrical issue. Two decades after the 911’s birth, Porsche optimised an ageing platform to conquer the toughest environments on earth. Thus, adding to the allure of the most adaptable sports car in history.

Porsche arrived at the 1985 Paris Dakar with the 959, a brand-new creation stacked with Weissach wizardry. Boasting a partly water-cooled engine, sequential twin turbos and a space age electro-hydraulic differential, the 959 skyrocketed the sophistication of Porsche’s off-road efforts. Initially, the 959 had been earmarked for a world rally campaign. However, this was swiftly cancelled following the end of the hedonistic Group B era.

With the 959 road car now way over budget and over due, Porsche’s most sophisticated car to date needed a boost. Weissach's workforce hoped that the 1985 Paris-Dakar would bring a much needed good news day to an arguably over-ambitious project.

Unfortunately, success was as dry as the deserts that broke Porsche’s resolve on the 1985 Paris-Dakar. Unperturbed by this dissapointment, the Rothmans Porsche team struck back in 1986 to win the event for the second time with an even further improved 959. 18 months later, the first of 292 eventual customers finally took delivery of their road going 959s.

Even today, ‘The Dakar’ is an incredibly committed viewing proposition. Fans of door bashing touring cars will be left disappointed by the solitary existence of a rally raid machine struggling to the end of a stage. In the 1980s, this obscure event may have flown under the radar of the press. However, Rothmans’ attention towards capturing the breath-taking footage of Ickx, Metge and Mass pummelling over the dunes attracted the coverage that Porsche, the drivers, and Rothmans deserved.

For any manufacturer, a racing program should ideally serve both marketing and technological development. However, the significance of any sporting achievement can only be truly realised with the might of promotion to an audience. Although the Rothmans-Porsche alliance came to a natural conclusion towards the end of 1987, the tobacco firm’s mindset of bringing footage to the front door of TV networks worldwide raised the bar of expectation for motor racing outside of Formula 1.

Pleasingly, Rothmans’ footage captured by the late Brian Kreisky lives on via the superb archive of films produced by Duke Video. Thus, immortalising this pioneering period of motor racing history.

Catch up on previous episodes

Episode one

Episode two