Two courageous Frenchmen entered the 1981 Paris-Dakar rally driving a badly customized Rolls-Royce Corniche. The bespoke off-roader exchanged the sands of the Sahara for the ice of St. Moritz last weekend. We had to ask our Aguttes buddies for a sub-zero joyride, of course.
The vehicle that most excited us at The Ice Concours of Elegance 2022 in St. Moritz wasn’t a specially designed Mercedes-Benz racer or a beautifully proportioned Maserati; rather, it was the oddball offspring of a Rolls-Royce, a Chevrolet, and a Toyota HJ45. To obtain a fair introduction to “Jules,” we meet with Gautier Rossignol, the director of Aguttes’ collector automobiles department.
Most creative individuals only experience true epiphanies when they are totally relaxed and are just bouncing about ideas without really worrying about turning them into reality. The exception to this is when they get their best ideas while taking a shower or using the restroom. This implies that these ideas occasionally emerge over one, two, or three bottles of wine. This is precisely what happened to Jean-Christophe Pelletier and Thierry de Montcorgé when the two, utterly inebriated, chose to convert Pelletier’s Rolls-Royce Corniche into a Dakar Rally vehicle. And a mere six months afterward, a Dakar legend emerged from a car whose unreliability had rendered it practically useless.
But first, some background information. The Paris-Dakar Rally had only been going for three years in 1981. A modest tournament with no bearing on today’s major event that was expertly planned, heavily sponsored, and extensively televised globally. It was less of a serious sporting endeavor and more of a New Year’s rush across Africa. But automakers like Land Rover were already spotting its marketing potential, launching a works Range Rover, and racers like the late great Jacky Ickx were just as keen to participate. When all of the participating cars pulled onto the start line on January 1, 1981, the “Jules Dakar Prototype” was considered a bit of a joke, even though the atmosphere was slightly more laid back than it is now. Was it, though, really?
“The car was built in about six months, but when you look at it, the conversion was done very thoughtfully,” Gautier explains. “Every body panel, with the exception of the doors, was replaced with a fiberglass duplicate in order to conserve weight. The chassis was rebuilt with a tubular spaceframe that had a straightforward rollcage added. The Toyota HJ45 drivetrain, which had sturdy live axles, leaf springs, and dual shocks for every wheel, was then coupled with all of this.
The 6.75-liter Rolls-Royce engine, which was smooth and powerful, was also replaced with a sturdy and unique Chevy small block that produced 350 horsepower and 530 torque. Jules could easily cruise at 150 km/h on gravel routes, and he could reach nearly 200 km/h on a standard road, as Thierry de Montcorgé subsequently recalled. The most astounding thing, according to Gautier, was that at one point during the rally, they actually finished 13th overall, eliminating the first mocking smirks on the faces of their rivals.