Almost 40 years ago Porsche set its sights on winning the Paris-Dakar Rally – and succeeded. Now a tribute to the go-anywhere 953, the 911 Dakar, has been launched, and as Andrew Frankel finds in the Saharan sands, it’s so much more than an off-road toy

The Porsche 953 trio in the 1984 Paris-Dakar Rally; no175 was driven by Jacky Ickx – a key figure in the car’s development

It’s funny how history finds a way to pay dividends decades after it was made. To this day Jaguar continues to dine out on its rich history at Le Mans despite it being 30 years since it last raced there, not least by charging millions for recreations of its old race cars. Until recently, Aston Martin did the same. Ferrari has just used the word ‘Daytona’ in a car’s name for the very first time to recall its 1967 two-fingered response to the GT40 on Ford home turf at the famed Florida race track. And had Jacky Ickx not been very forceful – and had he not carried an immense amount of clout in Stuttgart in the mid-1980s, you’d never be reading this story and Porsche wouldn’t have come up with yet another take on the 911 theme from which it will undoubtedly make countless bazillions of quid.

It wasn’t Ickx, left, that brought Porsche a Dakar win; René Metge, second left, had the honour

I’ll explain. In 1979 Ickx was looking for a third act, after his multitudinous successes first in single-seaters, then in sports cars, and it was upon the then still new Paris-Dakar Rally that his gaze soon settled. Thanks to an ongoing relationship with Citroën and the thought that its hydropneumatic system might do quite well in the desert, he was able to line up for the start of the 1981 event. The Citroën lasted almost all three weeks in some the most punishing environments on earth, only to crash out almost within sight of the Senegalese capital; but by then Ickx was hooked, not just by the rally, saying “over the course of the event we discovered a new world, one which broadened our horizons and opened up our minds”, but by the people he met along the way. When I met up with him in Saudi Arabia this January (where the Dakar has now relocated), he told me that not only was this ‘third career’ the one whose memory he cherishes most, but also that it changed him into someone he describes as “a less bad man”. He would end up competing in the Dakar rally 14 times.